


How Batman Learned That Family Vacations Are Almost Always Never A Good Idea

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-07 14:43:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 37,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6809425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>There is a small Jay/Dick out-take for this chapter, describing what happened at the other end of the line when Bruce called Jason: <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/6943387">That Three AM Phone Call</a>. Don't forget to click back here for the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6809425/chapters/15835141">epilogue</a>, though. :)</p>
        </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The farmhouse had seemed like such a good idea when he had bought it. And for the first twenty-four hours, it had been. 

“Give me a break, Ol,” Jordan said with a grin. They were in the kitchen, early evening light slanting through the windows, pretty much everyone a few beers to the south, but the day’s work had been solid, and Bruce could feel the pleasant ache in his muscles as he made himself a sandwich. Arthur was at the table with Hal and Ollie, and he was eyeing the cards Clark kept shuffling, obviously hoping for a rematch of last night’s poker game. “I mean, come on, Ol. Really?”

“Really what? You got a problem with it?”

“Of course I don’t have a problem with it, spend your money on any damn thing you want. But throwing fistfuls of cash at a third party candidate just doesn’t seem like the smartest investment, is all. I seriously doubt Bruce here is pissing his money down the crapper like that, in this election.”

“Leave me out of this,” Bruce said, examining a tomato. Diana was picking through the fruit in the bowl next to him, and selected an under-ripe apple. She stood eating it at the sink, watching the light settle outside. 

“Ah yeah man, we already know you’re gonna back the capitalist system all you can,” Ollie aimed at him over Hal’s head, and Bruce frowned momentarily – there was an edge to Ollie’s drinking tonight there hadn’t been last night. “I’m telling all of you dip-cones, this is the time we have to throw our shoulders into it, really put some muscle into dismantling the military-industrial complex in this country if our planet stands a chance of survival.”

“Always bringing the sunshine,” Barry said, as he reached for another beer.

“All the problems we’ve got, but somehow the military is the source of them all? Like, how exactly is the 81st Airborne supposed to solve climate change?” 

“I dunno Hal, but maybe if we weren’t funneling billions into a military black hole we could find out, you know? The military is a parasite on this country, and it’s been feeding off our blood and draining us dry for two hundred and twenty-five years. Any money I can put toward its destruction is a good day, in my book.” 

Hal was grinning and shaking his head. “Yeah, well, I guess you can be grateful fascists like me have been keeping your hippie ass safe since Yorktown, is all I got to say to that.”

“It’s time you got woke about what’s really going on, is what.”

“Oh, it’s time I got woke, Mr. Billionaire?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Only you won’t ever see the truth about the military, because you’re too fucking grateful to them for saving your peckerwood ass from a lifetime behind the cash register at the Quik-E-Mart.”

“Ol—” Barry said quietly, but Oliver rode right over him. 

“You probably would have been a hell of a lot happier back in white trash happyland, but no, you got to go kill innocent people so you could climb that almighty capitalist class ladder, and you refuse to see reality, which is that all the fucking military ever gave you was a neurotic shame complex about getting your cock sucked, and a taste for that high-test crank instead of your momma’s meth. That’s all the hell it ever did for you.”

What had been a genially quiet room a few minutes ago was a deathly still one now. Jordan was just sitting there, looking at Oliver, and Bruce had not known the man could look so white under all that tan. Jordan rose stiffly, and walked to the door onto the porch. The hinges of the screen door squeaked, and the door made its clanging noise as it shut, which now sounded much louder than it had before. 

“Jesus Christ,” Barry breathed, into the stillness.

Bruce tossed his sandwich in the sink, and wiped his mouth. “Get out of my house,” he said.

“Bruce, hey. . .I didn’t—”

“Now.” He finished wiping his hands and headed to the back door. He could see it in Oliver’s face, the dawning confused awareness of what he had just done. Bruce didn’t hold out much hope that that awareness would lead to any particular life change, but anything was possible.

* * *

Buying the farmhouse had been an investment, and he hadn’t thought much about it. His real estate manager had handled the deal, as part of a larger corporate acquisition. This property had been attached, and it hadn’t occurred to him to even look at it before resale until he had been thumbing through the recent financials and seen some aerial shots. Five hundred acres in upstate New York. Nothing around for miles and miles, in one of the most remote parts of the state. A rambling 1840s house that had been added onto and renovated within an inch of its life. Eight bedrooms.

He had laid the photos down thoughtfully, steepling his fingers.

He took them home that night and spread them on the kitchen counter, studying them. “Very nice,” Alfred had said, glancing over his shoulder. “Thinking about relocating, are we?”

“Hm? No, just. . . I don’t know. I suppose I was wondering if the League would find it useful.”

“For annual hayrides?”

Bruce shuffled through a few more of the photos and sipped his coffee. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the fourth photo in the stack. “The house is almost at the center of the property, and there’s room for any number of other buildings, only visible from the air. I know there’s the Watchtower, but the truth is we could use a place Earthside as well, particularly one out of public view. We could use it for gathering, but also for training. I could make it as secure as the Manor.”

“Hmph,” Alfred said.

“You think not?”

“I think the amount of your donations to the League, were they tax deductible, would underwrite Wayne Enterprises’ operating expenses for an entire fiscal year.”  
“Well, we can’t exactly incorporate as a 501(c)(3). I don’t know, I might drive up there this weekend and take a look. Maybe I’ll take Damian with me. The fresh air will do him good.”

Alfred had given him another skeptical look at that, but whether it had been about the drive, the finances, or Damian he couldn’t tell. Probably all three. He made it a rule never to prod Alfred about his skeptical looks.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Clark had said enthusiastically, when he had mentioned it to him.

“You do?”

“Absolutely. And you know what else we could do? We could have a few days where we all gather there every year, like a League retreat. All of us together, spending some time together like real people? I think it sounds great.”

“Oh, this has taken a turn.”

“Come on, I think it could be a lot of fun. And we could have an inaugural gathering in a few weeks, when the color in the trees will be beautiful upstate. I say, let’s do it.”

“I had in mind a training facility, not a summer camp.”

“Work hard, play hard.”

“Says the man who’s in bed by eight-thirty. Look, I’m not opposed to the idea of us all going up there together, because I want everyone to feel comfortable using it at their convenience, whenever they want. But we should take the opportunity to train together, to get some actual work done.”

“Sure!” Clark said. “Say, is that a barn? Are there horses?”

“Yes, and a petting zoo with baby goats.”

“Really?”

“I’ll give you some bread and let you feed the ducks. Now give me that,” Bruce said, snatching the pics from him. How someone who shot lasers out of his eyes could get so excited at the thought of baby goats was beyond him, but Clark’s enthusiasm for the property had decided him. 

And so three weeks later they had gathered at the farmhouse, which had been even lovelier than Bruce had thought. Alfred had stocked it, of course, and Bruce had had schematics drawn up for building a training facility, but for now the barn had enough room, and it was warm enough in the day to use the paddocks too. He would only feel truly comfortable once all the security measures were in place, but for now, he was satisfied with it. Being on the Watchtower was about looking out for Earth; being here could be about looking out for themselves, and for their team. He had been pleased with himself for having the idea. 

And so the day before yesterday they had all arrived: Clark, and Arthur, and Diana, and Barry, and Hal, and Oliver. A quiet few days working on training and strategic techniques, and enjoying some early fall air while they were at it. Because what could possibly go wrong, with seven of the world’s most supercharged personalities spending time together in the middle of the woods?

What, indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

He left Hal to himself for a while, because he reckoned that if it had been him, he wouldn’t have welcomed the intrusion. So he gave it about half an hour, and then went looking. He had thought maybe Barry would go looking for him, but Barry and Oliver were locked in an intense conversation over by Oliver’s car, and occasionally Bruce caught snatches of raised voices, so it looked like Oliver was on track to lose another relationship before the end of this day. Not for the first time in the last few days, he regretted Dinah’s absence. It occurred to him he had not been around Oliver without Dinah there for quite some time; maybe Ollie didn’t drink when she was around, or maybe she was covering for him, keeping him in line, nudging him away from the apocalypse every time he edged in that direction. 

Bruce went down to the basement, searching for what he knew was in there somewhere. Alfred was physically incapable of stocking a house for use without including this sort of thing, and his search bore fruit. He picked up a couple of glasses from the cabinet and headed out of the house.

He struck out for the barn at first, thinking he might encounter Hal by the paddocks. No sign of him there, or in the barn itself, and it began to occur to him Hal might simply have left – just lifted off and flown away, which was more than just possible, it was probable. It was getting dark anyway. But Bruce set off on the path to the lake just to be certain, and sure enough there he was, on the far side of the lake, sitting in a banged-up Adirondack chair looking out over the lake and watching the dark settle on it. Bruce picked his way along the path in the gathering dark and sat himself in the chair beside him, and they watched in silence.

Bruce uncorked the bottle he was carrying and set one glass on the arm of Hal’s chair, another on his. “Castarede Armagnac, 1967,” he said, filling a finger in Hal’s glass. “I said we were roughing it this week, but I didn’t say I was a barbarian.”

He heard the quiet whuff of Hal’s laugh. He filled his own, and lifted his glass to savor the first sip. “Give it a try,” he said. 

“I will in a bit.”

They sat in more silence, and it was full dark around the lake now. The woods were full of nighttime sounds. Bruce was beginning to wish he’d brought a jacket. He wondered if there was a residual glow from the ring that warmed Jordan, because he was sitting there apparently comfortable in just his T-shirt. “So if I were you,” Bruce said after a while. “I would be thinking that—”

“Don’t,” Hal said quietly.

“Don’t what?”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate all this—the expensive brandy, the avuncular talk, the attempt at male bonding—but I just. . . not right now, all right?”

He watched Jordan’s profile, the set of his jaw, and something knotted in his stomach. Oliver’s evisceration had been clean, quick, and deft. It was not a little trust Hal had placed in Ollie, for him to know some of those things about Hal, and Oliver had gone right down the list and betrayed him in every possible way. It had been quite the job. Bruce knew most of it, of course, but he knew it through solid investigatory work, and not because Hal Jordan would ever have shared any of that with him. But he knew enough to know what had bled him the most. It was the savage thrust of that casual “white trash.” That Oliver could ever have thought it, could have known exactly where to hit the vein like that, and could have had it in him to do it. . . Bruce downed his brandy and kept his eyes on the lake.

Outing him had been bad enough; that he had managed to do it while reproaching Hal for preferring to keep his private life away from the League had been even worse. But not worse than casually mocking the addiction. Bruce hadn’t known about Amber Jordan, but it did make sense of quite a few other things. Well. Jordan had been an idiot ever to trust Oliver Queen with that sort of information.

“He was drunk,” Bruce offered after a while.

“Yep.”

Bruce reached inside his pocket and pulled out the other thing he had grabbed before heading out of the house, and the lighter. He lit a cigarette and handed it to Jordan, who arched a brow but took it. “Well aren’t you just everybody’s bad friend from high school.”

“You had one of those too?”

“Hell no, I _was_ one of those. Nobody’s life ever took a turn for the better by hanging around me.” He took a drag off the cigarette and tipped his head against the back of his chair, sending the smoke in a long plume that got lost in the dark. 

“You raise a fair point,” Bruce said, lighting one for himself. “My life since meeting you has become considerably more complicated.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s all my fault.”

They smoked in silence, and Bruce watched the glowing tip of Jordan’s cigarette. “About Ollie,” Jordan finally said. “He and Dinah are going through some stuff right now, and he’s. . . pretty messed up about it.”

“Interesting.”

“How so?”

“Didn’t think you would be making excuses for him.”

Jordan smoked for a bit, and studied the end of his cigarette. “It’s not like that,” he said. “I was just explaining. In case you were wondering what was going on with him.”

Bruce snorted at that, and Jordan turned his head to look at him. “I take it you don’t so much care.”

“I care that he gets treatment, or he’s out of the League.”

“The League has its share of substance abusers.”

Bruce peered through the bottom of his brandy at the murky lake. “The League has its share of people who know where the line is between occasional relief of pain, and something else.”

“Sure about that are you,” Jordan murmured. 

“Sure enough to know why you’re not reaching for that brandy.”

“Oh is that what it is? They didn’t sell that at the Qwik-E-Mart back home.” Jordan flicked his cigarette off into the leaves, and Bruce watched it sputter and fizzle in the slightly damp undergrowth. 

“You’re going to burn down all of upstate New York.”

“Take it out of my paycheck. So I’m gonna lift off in a few, head back to civilization I think.”

“Please don’t.”

“Yeah. Well, whatever’s going on with Ollie right now, I’m not gonna stick around to deal with it, so.”

“Oliver’s already gone.”

“What, he just left? Doesn’t sound like him.”

“He left because I told him to.”

Hal turned his head and studied Bruce. There was a frown of surprise on his face. “You—what? Why? Bruce, Ollie and I go nine rounds all the time, you didn’t have to—”

“Give me a break. He’s lucky I don’t ask him to leave the League.”

“Bruce. You don’t get to control who gets kicked out of the League, for fuck’s sake.”

“You think I don’t? You might want to take a look at those by-laws you signed a few years ago.”

“I—what? Are you serious?”

“I am. When Clark and I agree, any League member can be forced to withdraw.”

“When Clark and you—what the fuck. Because of course you picked Clark, the one person you can count on to agree with you nine hundred percent of the time. What the hell kind of star chamber shit is that?”

“You’re defending Oliver?”

“Hell no, I’m defending the principle. I realize the two of you think you are Palpatine and Lord Vader, but for fuck’s sake, that table in the council room is round for a reason. Everyone’s vote counts the same in the League, and the two of you don’t get to pull shit like this.”

Bruce was silent. “In this analogy, am I Vader?”

“What are you talking about, of course you’re Vader.”

“All right, just checking.”

They sat in a silence that was like most of their silences – not one of agreement, certainly, but of a shared disagreement that was, if not amicable, at least comfortable. After a while Bruce rose. “So I’ll leave you be,” he said. “But two things. The first is, you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think I'm going to let Oliver Queen stay one more second in my house, after tonight. Whatever else we may disagree on, I think we can agree that this at least is my house, and I have the right to kick out whomever I choose. And the second thing is this.”

He bent and picked up the brandy, and his glass along with it. “No one in that room thinks any differently of you than they did yesterday. Nothing Ollie said made any difference to anyone in that room. In case that was something you were worried about.”

He couldn’t see Jordan’s eyes in the shadow of the pines, but he knew they were watching him. “Well,” Bruce said. “That’s not entirely true. I think a bit differently of you, I admit.”

“Do you now.”

“Yes. What you did is not something I think I would have been able to do. You got up and you walked out of that room, and I. . .” Bruce turned and squinted out at the lake. “Not sure I could have done that, had it been me,” he said. “That’s the action of a very good man. Maybe a better man than I am. Anyway.” He turned back to Jordan. “I’ll head back to the house. I think I’ll leave the Armagnac in case you change your mind about it. It’s spectacular, you really ought to try it.”

He headed back, but he was standing in between Jordan and the lake, and the path was behind their chairs, so he had to cross in front of him and then go behind to hit the path, and as he did, he heard Hal say, so softly he almost missed it, “Bruce.”

He stopped, behind Jordan’s chair. “Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

On impulse, and not knowing he was going to do it, he reached down and rested his hand on Jordan’s shoulder, squeezing it. Jordan’s hand came up and covered his, tightly, and they stayed like that for a minute. “Don’t go,” Bruce whispered. “I know you would like to, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, but please stay.”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

Bruce squeezed his shoulder again. “Thank you,” he said, and released him, heading up the path back the long walk to the house. He paused at the top of the path, just before he headed into the trees. 

“Look,” he said. “About the by-laws. It’s important that you know what they are. I know they’re long, and I know they’re boring, but you don’t get to ignore important documents just because they don’t come in scratch-and-sniff.”

“I knew you couldn’t do it,” Jordan said. “You just couldn’t let us have this moment, could you?”

“Like I said, better man than I am.”

“Go on, get out of here,” Jordan said, but he could hear the grin in his voice, and it warmed him better than the brandy, all the long trudge back to the house.

* * *

He was lost in thought as he came up the path by the barn, which was why he didn’t at first register who was waiting for him at the paddock fenceline, just beyond the porch. “Bruce,” Oliver called, when he was almost level with him, and Bruce stopped. 

“If this is your apology,” he said, “it’s ill-timed, not to mention misdirected. I told you to get out of here.”

“Come on, don’t be like that. Whatever that whiny-ass little—”

What the end of that sentence was, Bruce never knew. Faster than his own calculation, his fist had landed right across Oliver’s jaw. The man staggered and doubled over, but Bruce grabbed him before he could topple and shoved him into the fence. Bruce twisted his arm back with a savage wrench and grabbed the back of his head and pushed his face into the rails. He ignored Oliver’s incoherent splutters. “You son of a bitch,” he whispered into Oliver’s ear. He kept twisting that arm until he got the moan he was waiting for. “I said to get out of my house.”

“Fuck you,” Oliver spat. “What the fuck do you care about Hal anyway.”

Bruce spun him around and brought his knee up with devastating accuracy, and at that Oliver did go down. He was clutching the bottom fence rail and retching. Bruce grabbed his hair and hauled him up again, and bent his neck back, put his mouth right on Oliver’s ear. “You think you know what I care about,” he managed through his tight jaw. “You think you have any idea. You don’t know me. I don’t know the man who could do what you did tonight.” 

And he hurled him back to the ground, where he stayed on his knees, one hand bracing himself, coughing and wiping at his face. Bruce’s foot lifted to boot him in the stomach, but he stopped in time. 

“Get out of my goddamn house,” he said, and turned to head up to the house, because Hal wasn’t the only one who could walk away.

On the porch, Clark was standing there with his arms crossed. He had clearly been watching the whole thing. Bruce climbed the stairs. “Thought you might step in there and stop me,” he said. 

“Nope,” Clark said.

“Bit surprising.”

“Yep. Brought you a beer,” he said, handing Bruce a frosty and uncapped bottle, matching the one in Clark’s hand.

“Thanks. Think I‘ll pass though.” The brandy – of which he had had a fair amount – was still singing in his veins. 

“I don’t really think he’s in much shape to go anywhere now,” Clark said, nodding Oliver’s direction. He was hauling himself up on the fence, and weaving a bit. 

“Yeah,” Bruce sighed. “Listen, would you mind?”

“Nah, I figured. I’ll take care of getting him home. Don’t eat all the pie while I’m gone, though.”

“There’s pie?”

“Yeah, Barry went to the store. Got ice cream too.”

“The nearest store’s thirty-five miles—right,” Bruce sighed. “So much for security and keeping a low profile. It better not be vanilla.”

“Would I do that to you? I texted him to get you a pint of rum raisin.”

“Good man.”

“Hey. Is he going to be all right?” The concern in his voice told Bruce he was not asking about Oliver. Bruce shrugged. 

“It’s Jordan, he’ll be fine. His capacity to feel emotion is somewhere between Labradoodle and over-sugared three-year-old anyway.”

“For real though,” Clark said, and Bruce paused, his hand on the screen door knob. 

“How would you be?” he said. “Get Oliver out of here for me. Don’t feel obligated to be too gentle on the landing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.”


	3. Chapter 3

He lay awake that night, listening to the sounds of the house in the extraordinary, unnatural quiet. 

He had taken the downstairs bedroom, not because it was the largest one, but because he knew his insomnia well enough to know he would be up and prowling around frequently, and there was no need to wake everyone in the house. The country might be useful for security, but he would never sleep as well there as he did in the city; he wasn’t like Clark, whose lungs he could see expand in the country air, whose smile was brighter, whose step (if possible) had even more spring once he was outside city limits. 

He was also listening because Jordan had not come back to the house. 

He hadn’t actually thought he would leave, after he had promised to stay. So part of him had been relieved to hear the quiet creak of the screen door, about three in the morning. Jordan moved like a cat, but the squeak in the door was something he couldn’t help. It should probably be fixed. Or maybe not; it might be useful to know people’s comings and goings.

For instance, he knew that Diana was not in her bedroom in the southeast gable of the house. 

It was not that he begrudged them, or particularly disapproved. It was, in fact, something he had wondered occasionally about—what sex must be like for Clark, when he could never fully let himself go, never let down that guard on himself in even the most intimate situations. It pleased him to think that they had each other, and that it was an arrangement that was convenient to them both. “It’s. . . not like that,” Clark had said uncomfortably, when Bruce had questioned him about it on the drive up.

“Not like what?”

“Not like. . . what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking you were two people with needs that only the other could reasonably meet.”

“Oh,” Clark had said. “Okay then, it is like what you’re thinking.”

“Good,” Bruce said. 

“Good? Really?”

“Yes. It’s best for team dynamics that way. If the two of you can separate emotions from sex, and accept the transactional nature of your relationship without letting it get entangled in unnecessary complications, then I say good.”

“Okay,” Clark said, and he had looked quietly out the window for about fifteen minutes, his face turned away from Bruce.

“You’re not, are you,” Bruce said.

“I’m trying. It’s not as easy for me as it is for you, that kind of . . . look, can this not be a thing we talk about?”

Bruce had been silent at that. The remark about it being easy for him had rankled, so he had been glad of the quiet. Clark thought him some kind of automaton, someone who didn’t experience normal emotions. Maybe that was what all of them thought. Almost certainly that was what Jordan thought about him. 

At any rate, it didn’t require any particular detective skills to know where Diana was tonight. Whatever else the two of them might be, surreptitious was not among their skills. Bruce could hear the occasional knock of the bed against the wall overhead, a muffled sound or two. Bruce sighed, and after a while he kicked back the covers and pulled on his sweatpants. He padded out into the hallway, heading quietly to the kitchen, prepared to make some coffee and maybe get some work done. He stopped in the hall when he realized he was not alone. Someone was in the kitchen. Jordan. Jordan was talking to someone. Who was in there with him? What was he—

Bruce withdrew into the shadows when he realized the man was on the phone. The thing to do was to go back to bed, shut his door. He should emphatically not stand here in the dark, listening to Jordan’s phone conversation. It was just. . . the man’s voice had sounded so. . . 

“I don’t even know,” Jordan was whispering. “I swear to fuck, I don’t know how this is happening.”

Broken, was how he sounded.

The kitchen door was only half closed, and he could see Jordan sitting on the floor in the dark, his back against the cabinets. His eyes closed, phone gripped tight. Fingers rubbing at his forehead. He was listening to someone. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I guess I just really thought—fuck, I don’t know. Maybe I did. Maybe I really thought it would go away, and everything everyone was talking about in meetings, it didn’t apply to me.”

Bruce held himself motionless, stilling his breath. 

“Yeah, well, I realize that now, thanks,” Jordan was saying. “Jesus Christ, I just can’t even. . .” He watched as Jordan balled his hand into a fist, and the fist beat on his forehead. “I could do it right now. It would be so fucking easy, Cat. I could fly in to the city, score a hit, shoot it up, and get back here before anyone even knew I was gone. I could do it within the hour. I could be high in thirty-five minutes. Maybe less. I’ve been telling myself all night it wouldn’t have to be like before. It wouldn’t, you know? I’m older now, I’m smarter, I’m stronger, I can control it, I can, I just want it so fucking bad. . .”

He was practically curled into a ball, and the fist was now a claw raking at his hair. Bruce could hear the rasp of his breathing. He shouldn’t be listening to this. 

“I don’t know,” Jordan whispered. “Since earlier this week, I guess. At first I thought—I thought it would go away, like it always does, if I just ignore it. And tonight—tonight has just been really shitty.”

Bruce shut his eyes briefly. Whoever Cat was—and he couldn’t think of any Cat in Jordan’s personal file—it was sure as hell someone who knew his identity, if he was talking about flying somewhere. He could almost not make sense of what he was hearing. Had Jordan learned nothing about trusting people with personal information like this? 

“I can’t—I don’t really want to talk about that part of it,” Jordan said. “Maybe I’m lying to myself about it starting earlier in the week, maybe it was all tonight. Fuck I just need to be high right now, if I went into the city and did it and then called you would you still talk to me? Everyone bails at least once, right? Didn’t you? Haven’t you done it?”

The silence this time was a long one, as Jordan listened. He tipped his head back against the cabinets again. “Yeah,” he finally whispered, a thread of sound. “No,” he said. “No, Cat, you can’t. You can’t come up here, it’s—it’s League stuff, they wouldn’t understand.” He laughed. “Yeah, I get that you don’t give a shit about that, but they will.”

He watched as the small laugh was erased from Jordan’s face by her next question. He was grave again. “Yeah,” he said. “That situation hasn’t changed. And yeah, you’re right, that’s part of it too. Doesn’t help that it’s his house I’m in. Of all people. Fuck.”

Bruce felt a chill lick his veins. _His house? That situation?_ What the hell was Jordan talking about? Curious what a stab that was, that Jordan’s dislike of him was that strong. He had thought of their disagreements as more. . . functional, rather than fundamental. Incidental to their larger mission. Clearly he had been wrong about that. 

“Yeah,” Jordan was whispering. “I know. I just. . . I’m not gonna do it, I know now I’m not. I didn’t know it before. I didn’t know it an hour ago. I just didn’t know it could be this bad this many years out, you know? I’m just. . . I’m still dealing with that. Gonna be dealing with that for a while. I mean, fuck. Does this ever go away?”

He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, don’t sugarcoat it for me there.”

Bruce retreated into the shadows. He went back to his room, weighing his options. He lay back down on the bed and thought of the broken thread of Jordan’s voice. It might not be a difficult matter to hook an encryptor to Jordan’s phone and find out who this Cat was, who clearly knew things about the League she had no business knowing. He shut his eyes, contemplating investigatory methods, and he might have slept briefly – it might have been twenty minutes, or an hour. The house was still now, the kitchen soundless. He padded silently down the hall and found Jordan still sitting there – the phone on the floor beside him now, his eyes closed. He was asleep where he sat. Bruce pushed back the kitchen door and bent beside him.

“Hey,” he said, a hand on the man’s shoulder.

Jordan blinked awake. “Sorry,” he mumbled. 

“You need to get to bed. Come on.” Bruce half-hoisted him, and Jordan followed him obediently. Bruce guided him into his bedroom – it was closest, and he himself was going to be up for a while anyway. He could always sleep on the couch. “In you go,” he said, and Jordan fell on the bed without protest, curled the covers up over himself like a child. Bruce turned to go.

“Hey,” Jordan murmured. “Aren’t you gonna lie down?”

Bruce hesitated. “I don’t bite,” Jordan said sleepily. So Bruce got stiffly into the bed beside him, and lay with his hands folded on his bare stomach. It was a queen size mattress, but that was none too large a bed for two men of their build. He glanced over, and Jordan’s eyes were awake and watching him. 

“I heard some of your phone conversation,” Bruce said. 

“Mm,” Jordan said. He seemed untroubled. 

“Who is Cat?”

“She’s my sponsor. Has been for a long time.”

“She knows you’re the Green Lantern.”

“She does. That’s the only way this works, you know? I mean, I realize you don’t know, that this is something you know jack shit about, but trust me, hiding things from your sponsor doesn’t work. I can’t make up shit about what I’m going through. There’s stuff she has to know, or I might as well say fuck it to the whole recovery thing.”

“And you trust her.”

“Yeah, I do. She’s good people, Bruce. And she’s down with the whole capes thing. She’s friends with Kara. Kara trusts her.”

Bruce turned. “Cat Grant? Your sponsor is Cat Grant?”

“Mm hm,” Jordan said. “Which is me telling you stuff about her you have no business knowing, so I’m trusting you too.”

“Does it occur to you that perhaps you’re too trusting? That maybe Oliver knew things about you he should never have known in the first place?”

“There it is,” Jordan said, propping on his elbow to look at Bruce. “I knew we’d arrive at _it was your fault_ before too long. Like six hours though, instead of your usual six minutes, so that’s some progress. And yeah, I trust people. A few. Maybe I shouldn’t. But the alternative is to end up like you, so.”

Bruce just studied him, and Jordan studied him right back. It was like most of their arguments, but drained of rancor. Maybe it was because it was so late. Or early. It must be around four. Dawn couldn’t be too far away.

“So Clark and Diana are sleeping together, huh?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s weird. And. . . really pretty fucking hot, when you think about it.”

“I don’t. And you shouldn’t either.”

“You’re no fun. What’s the harm in a few sexual fantasies between friends?”

“Plenty.”

“You not jealous at all?”

He frowned. “Of whom, exactly?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it. But I thought you and Clark had kind of a friends with benefits thing.”

“You’re mistaken. Not to mention vastly over-sexed.”

“Well, that’s fantasies nine through seventy-nine you’ve killed right there. Seriously though, I’m happy for them. Good for them, you know?”

“Yes,” Bruce said.

Jordan was silent a minute. “Makes the rest of us feel a little bit lonelier though, huh.”

Bruce watched the ceiling. “Yes,” he said again, more quietly. 

Jordan said nothing more for a while, and Bruce thought he had drifted off to sleep. He turned to look at him, and found those over-large eyes just watching him. 

“Hey Bruce,” Jordan said softly. “Wanna make out?”

He just stared without looking away, and the decision-making centers of his brain quietly folded up shop and went on vacation. Most higher-order brain function, in fact. He just kept looking at Jordan. It wasn’t that he thought he had misheard; it was that he had heard only too well. And still, nothing helpful was happening in his brain. 

“Yeah, see, I know ‘intense eye contact’ is like some kind of Bruce Wayne sign language, but I’m gonna need a verbal on this one. Use your words, beautiful.”

Maybe it was the _beautiful_ that decided him. Maybe he had decided a long time ago. Maybe it was Hal Jordan’s angular face in the moonlight, or maybe it was just that he was tired. But for whatever reason the answer that came out of his mouth was not one he was expecting. 

“I—yes.”

Jordan just smiled, but it wasn’t a predatory smile or anything like that. He scooted closer, and Bruce’s heart – _now_ his body decided to come back online – started racing. Maybe it was just that it had felt like a dare, and that was why he hadn’t said no. Because he wouldn’t back down. Maybe Jordan was teasing him, would veer away at the last second and laugh at him. 

So he held still, and Jordan’s lips brushed his own. Something of his apprehension must have showed in his face. “Just making out, I promise,” Jordan whispered in his ear.

“No, it’s—I’m fine.”

Jordan’s hands were sliding around his waist. Jordan’s mouth was back to his. He had not thought the man would be this gentle. There wasn’t even tongue, yet. Just kisses on his mouth, and a little bit to the side of his mouth. He needed not to be lying here like a log, but he couldn’t think what to do. Why was he frozen like he was seventeen again, and he was in the back of the boathouse with the senior girl from Choate? Fuck that. His arms came around Jordan’s waist, and he raised his head fractionally, and this time when Jordan’s mouth came back he pushed into it, opened slightly. 

Jordan’s lips were firm, but not unpleasant. He could feel the rasp of stubble against his own, and that too was not unpleasant. He could taste the cigarette from before, and the smell of the woods. He could feel the strong muscles in Jordan’s back. It felt good to hold those muscles. There was a tongue that flicked at his, and Bruce felt a small tremor in his middle at it. 

And then Hal was lifting his head, studying him. Bruce felt too naked by far. “We stop whenever you want to,” Jordan whispered, and Bruce nodded. 

He had thought Jordan would be different, in bed. Most people’s activity in bed was an extension of their personality out of it. But this tenderness, this slow-moving consideration. . . either his theory was wrong, or there were whole parts of Jordan’s personality he had not accounted for. 

He shifted a little to the side, to give himself a better angle on Jordan’s mouth. They really were just making out, and he realized it had been a long—a very long—time since he had done something so simple and uncomplicated. A long time since he had kissed someone he didn’t need to wear a mask for, of one sort or another. 

“Can you take off your shirt?” he said. Jordan complied in one smooth motion, pitching the T shirt over the edge of the bed. It was just that he himself wasn’t wearing a shirt, and it felt odd for him to be half-naked if Jordan was not. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. He had been staring. He had seen Jordan’s naked chest before, plenty of times. But he was newly aware the man was perfectly proportioned, in ways he knew he himself was not. He ran his hands along Jordan’s chest, to his back again. He let his hands spread on the small of his back. It was a smaller waist than you would think, a leaner frame than you would think unless you were pressed up against it like this.

Jordan’s mouth was back on his, and they were kissing again. He didn’t want the kissing to stop. Jordan’s fingers were in his hair, the back of his scalp, pulling him in closer. Their tongues were just sliding against each other now, slow steady strokes. Bruce’s fingers tightened on Hal’s waist, held him in place. 

“You want me to stop?”

“I. . . no.”

“You’re pushing me away.”

“I’m. . .” He was, he realized. Jordan was glancing down to where Bruce was holding his waist at arm’s length, stiffly away from him. “Sorry.”

“’S okay. You doing that because you’re getting hard?”

“Yes,” he said faintly. It was a lie. He wasn’t getting hard. His cock had been stiffening from the minute Jordan’s lips had brushed his. He was full hard now, and wearing sweatpants, which made it painfully obvious. 

“Me too,” Jordan said, and closed his fingers on Bruce’s wrist, gently. He watched Bruce’s eyes. He moved the hand to the crotch of his jeans. He let Bruce’s hand rest there. Bruce could feel the firm outline of cock beneath the thick denim. Bruce let his thumb move a little. He watched Jordan’s eyes slide shut, heard a long quiet intake of breath. Jordan’s eyes fluttered open, and he moved his hand to Bruce’s sweatpants.

“This okay?” he whispered. Bruce nodded. Jordan cupped him through the sweatpants. He made himself not flinch away. He was aware his own breathing had quickened. Jordan’s thumb was moving in the same way his own had, and his cock jumped at the touch, ached at it. Jordan’s hand rubbed at the whole length of him.

“You’re big,” he said, and Bruce looked away, looked aside, his cheekbones prickling. “Beautiful, that’s a _good_ thing,” Jordan said, and there were fingers tipping his jaw, a warm sweet mouth closing on his again. It was the warmth he couldn’t quite account for, the warmth he couldn’t get enough of. It was like California had seeped into Jordan’s skin somehow, had warmed his tongue, his fingers. Just like Gotham had seeped into him, infected him with its deadly cold. 

Bruce groaned and pushed that warmth further into his mouth. And Jordan shifted so his hips were snug against Bruce’s now. The bulge of his jeans was up against the bulge of Bruce’s sweatpants. “Yeah?” Jordan whispered, and “Yeah,” Bruce whispered back. He let his fingers dig into Jordan’s ass and push him in even closer. There was a firm ridge against him now, against the firm ridge of his cock. He was leaking wet, he could feel it. Jordan’s mouth slid to his neck.

“God,” Bruce panted, when Jordan’s mouth had teeth behind it. He clutched at that mop of hair. So much softer than he had thought. Jordan rolled them a bit, and he was on top of Bruce now, and Bruce’s fingers were pressing his ass in closer, and there was a thick insistent push at his cock, and it felt so good, and Bruce kissed him harder, harder, tangled him in his arms. 

“Hey,” Jordan was whispering. “I promised just making out, so if that’s what we’re doing, I. . . I kind of need to stop.”

He heard the heavy rasp of his own breath in the quiet room. “Hal,” he said. Those hips shifted again, the firm ridge of cock pressed right against his. 

“What I’m saying is, I’m gonna have to come.”

Bruce nodded. Jordan was just watching him. He wasn’t sure what calculation was happening behind those dark eyes, even darker now. “You want my hand on you?” came the quiet voice, and Bruce nodded again. There was a warm hand sliding inside his sweatpants. Straying to his balls, cupping them. Bruce opened his mouth and sucked air. Jordan’s eyes, watching him, seeing too much. Fuck, that warm hand on his balls. Oh fuck.

Jordan was shifting closer still, and now his hand was working the fly on his own jeans. He was pushing them down, pushing down his shorts. Jordan’s cock was thick and curved. He stopped what he was doing and let Bruce look. Bruce reached out and touched the silk of it, ran his fingers up and down it. Jordan wrenched his head to the side and buried it in a pillow. He was burying a moan. He had made Jordan make that noise. 

Jordan’s hand covered his, joined his. And then Jordan’s hand was on his cock, too. Both of their cocks together. His fingers just lightly rubbing. “Yeah?” he said, so soft Bruce might have missed it. Bruce nodded. 

They were lying side by side, pressed so close, so close. His head was on Jordan’s shoulder, Jordan’s mouth on his jaw. Bruce fucked against that firm hot ridge of cock, those warm deft fingers. He couldn’t lie still anymore. He had to fuck something. Hal was fucking against him, fucking right back at him. His fingers dug into Hal. He knew he was leaving bruises. 

His foot struck out, found mattress. He arched up, bit his lip to fight the groan. “You gonna come, beautiful?” 

He lost his fight, and the groan spilled out of him, loud and deep, with the heavy waves of cum coating Hal’s hand. “Shhhh,” said Hal, but he was laughing at the same time. Another wave of orgasm caught him, and he spasmed up, into the weight of Jordan’s body. 

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Jordan hissed, and his rhythm changed, and there was even more wet between them. “Ah ah ah,” he panted, and Bruce could feel it, could feel Jordan’s come sliding against his cock, could feel the waves of Jordan’s pleasure up against his body. He wanted to climb inside it, to feel it with him. 

He was being wiped, cleaned. Covers pulled up over him. A warm body, hot like the sun, next to his. He turned his head to find those eyes, just as warm, watching him. He watched back. Jordan’s hand stroked his chest. Bruce reached up and grabbed the hand, pressed it to his face. The hand that had brought them both such pleasure. He had never come so hard. 

Jordan’s lids were drooping. Bruce could feel the warmth inside of him now, too. Jordan’s come had seeped into his skin, heated him the same way. Bruce looped an arm around the man’s body, and Jordan’s arm did the same to him, like an anchor. Bruce could see him trying to stay awake. 

“Go to sleep,” he whispered, and Jordan’s eyes flickered open one last time, rested on his face. Then the eyes drifted shut and didn’t open again. Bruce watched them for a long time.

“ _Beautiful_ ,” he mouthed into the dark, trying the sound of it.


	4. Chapter 4

He woke to sun on his back – the sun of mid-morning. He had actually slept, and slept far longer than he had planned to. Long enough that the house was quiet. Everyone must be down at the barn already. They had let him sleep, and that was kind. The sun on his back was kind too. Last night came back to him in a rush, and he smiled blearily at the memory of it. The floorboards were warm beneath his feet where the sun had baked them, and that too was a good thing.

He snorted half a laugh, staring in the bathroom mirror. Jordan’s oral fixation had rendered his neck a purpled blossom of marks, but fortunately the early fall days were chilly enough up here that a turtleneck was not out of order. The man was an inconsiderate child. Bruce laughed again. 

He emerged after a leisurely shower and shave to find the coffee still warm in the kitchen, which was also kind of someone. He sipped his coffee and watched activity down at the barn from the window. Arthur was leaning against the fence, calling to someone, and Diana was about thirty feet up. Any higher than that and she risked being spotted, but she knew what she was doing. The day seemed full of possibility. He should call Alfred and check on things at the house, check on Damian. Thinking of his son made the warm knot of happiness in his chest expand even further. Damian would like it up here. He could get more cows, whatever animals Damian wanted. For a moment he thought about Jason up here, and laughed again at the thought of that – Jason would probably hate the country, would blast a hole through the roof when a possum landed on it. _Jason, you demented clod, you just took out a marsupial_ , Tim would yell. Maybe he could persuade Dick to join them. It might do all of them some good.

He headed down to the barn, his coffee still in hand. Arthur and Hal were sparring now, with the six-foot escrima sticks he had had stocked in the tack room. _Oh sure, because who doesn’t have a room full of these in their barn?_ Hal had said with an eyeroll, on his first tour of the place. Bruce smiled into his coffee, watching them. Hal’s technique was a nightmare, but he was faster than Arthur, leaner and quicker. If he knew Bruce was watching him he didn’t give any sign of it; all his focus was on his fight. 

Clark came and leaned against the fence beside him. “You’re on the inside of the fence,” Bruce observed. “I’d look out if I were you.”

“Oh, I think I can take ‘em,” Clark said easily. “You sleep okay?”

“Remarkably well.”

They watched Hal and Arthur spar in silence—their silence, not Hal and Arthur’s, because every time Hal got in a hit he let out a triumphant “HAH!” like the nine-year-old he was. Bruce hid another smile in his coffee. Barry and Diana were a few yards down the fenceline, watching from there, and Barry said something that made Diana laugh out loud. 

“You know,” Clark said, “you weren’t as quiet as you thought, last night.”

“Really. Well, right back at you.”

Clark’s mouth twisted in a reluctant grin. “That wasn’t _my_ fault,” he said. 

“Mm hm. I’ll be presenting you a bill for my furniture.”

“Stop changing the subject.”

“There’s no subject, and nothing to talk about.”

“Right. Mr. Transactional Nature, I forgot.”

Bruce shrugged, and went back to his coffee. Barry called something to Hal, and Hal turned his head, and Arthur seized his chance. Distractible, as ever. Hal was pinned in under three seconds, and then Arthur was giving him a hand up. Hal was laughing. “Hey, no shit-talking from the stands,” he called to Barry, who was still laughing. “Your turn, big guy,” Hal said, tossing the escrima to Clark, who caught it easily. 

Hal trotted over to Barry and Diana and vaulted the fence. He looped an arm around Barry, who ruffled his hair. They were talking to Diana, who seemed to be pointing out weaknesses in Hal’s technique, imitating a two-handed swing, her graceful body moving slowly to show him the torque of what she was talking about. Hal was listening with his arm still slung around Barry, a bemused smile on his face. Barry’s arm was around Hal’s waist. Hal was leaning into Barry’s body, still smiling. He didn’t so much as glance Bruce’s direction. Message received. 

Bruce took another swig of coffee, but it tasted sour and flat. “I think I’m going to get some work done inside,” he said to Clark. “Lucius has been after me to read through the recent financials, and it has to get done this week. Might as well knock out what I can while I have the time.”

“Oh,” Clark said in surprise. “But don’t you want to—”

“No,” Bruce said. He headed back to the porch, and didn’t look behind him.

* * *

He sat at the desk in what Alfred had set up as the study, and opened his laptop. By eleven the headache had settled into the base of his neck, and by eleven-thirty his temples were pounding. 

_Here’s a thought_ , said his brain, that overly helpful organ that had decided to drive back to the city and abandon him last night. _Why don’t you get up and get your glasses from your room? You know you need them._

He clicked to the next file, the next string of numbers, and resolutely kept reading. He hit print on a few pages. 

_Let’s talk about why you aren’t getting up to get your glasses. Could it possibly be, oh incredibly vain one, that you don’t care to remind everyone else that you are the oldest member of the League, and the only one both mortal enough and old enough to need glasses?_

He snatched the sheets from the printer and picked up a highlighter, marking through them savagely. 

_Or could it possibly be that you decided to sleep with someone five years younger, who happens to look ten years younger, and if that someone happened to see you—_

“Fine,” he said angrily, and got up, went to his room, rummaged through his bag for his glasses. He grabbed some Advil while he was at it. _Think anyone else keeps some prophylactic painkillers in their bag? Probably not. You know why that is, old man?_

If he thought heavy drinking would shut down the voice inside him, he would have resorted to it hours ago. In his experience alcohol only magnified the effect, and God knew he had tried. He returned to the study and worked steadily. He kept on working when everyone came back to the house for lunch. He could hear them laughing and talking through the closed doors of the study. He read his e-mails and considered his replies, copying Lucius on most of it. 

After a while he got up and went for more coffee in the kitchen. Of course someone had turned off the coffeemaker, and his coffee was now cold as well as stale. He poured himself a full mug. At the table Jordan was telling some story, too loud, and Clark was laughing. Arthur’s head was in the fridge. That man was always eating.

“Hey,” Clark called to him. “You want a sandwich?”

“I’m fine.” 

Jordan was laughing at his own story, getting up now, and his hand was sliding on Barry’s shoulder, resting there while he leaned over to the counter for more ketchup. Bruce turned to head back to the study.

He resettled and focused only on his work. He opened some new Watchtower schematics he had been fiddling with last week and let himself get absorbed in that, as a reward for getting most of the WE business out of the way. After a while one of the doors slid open. Bruce did not look up. “Hey,” Jordan said. “What’s up?”

“Work,” he said shortly. He heard the door sliding shut, but Jordan had come into the room, leaning on the back of one of the wingchairs. 

“Oh okay,” he said. “So you gonna hide in here all day?”

“This is what work looks like,” he said, finishing his email.

“And all that work has to be done today.”

“Yes, in fact.”

“Right. Well that’s good to know. And it’s totally not that you’re going out of your way to avoid me.”

Bruce glanced up over his glasses. Jordan was standing there holding a plate with a sandwich on it. “Oh look at that,” he said, “eye contact. Don’t hurt yourself or anything. Your wife made you a sandwich, and he said not to bother you, but I’m not very good at following directions. Hope you choke on it.” He slid the plate onto the corner of the desk. 

“On the phone last night,” Bruce said sharply, when Jordan was almost at the door. “You told Cat I was part of the problem. How, exactly? What’s your reason for blaming me for your addiction problems, other than your chronic inability to take responsibility for your own actions?”

“You son of a bitch,” Jordan said. His voice was quiet. “Yeah, I said that. I said it because Cat knows I’ve had feelings for you for a long time, and it’s a problem, because I sure as hell knew that was never going anywhere.”

“Oh,” Bruce managed. 

“Yeah, oh. But hey, don’t worry—problem solved.” He yanked open the door and slammed it shut behind him, so hard it bounced a little, leaving a gap in the door.

 _Hello there_ , said his brain. _I was just taking a break for a minute, enjoying this lovely sandwich. I’m sorry, did you need me to be paying attention here?_

He stared at the blinking cursor on his email. He rose and tossed his glasses on the desk, paced the room a minute, rubbing at his eyes. And then he swept the desk clear. He had only meant to push aside a few papers. But somehow his laptop had collided with the opposite wall, and everything on his desk was on the floor, and he was breathing fast. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he spat. 

He wanted to laugh, thinking about his solemn self-righteous lecture to Clark in the car, all about how emotional connections and sexual relationships interfered with team dynamics. What a joke he was. What a goddamn hypocrite. And Clark probably knew it, had probably been listening to the whole exchange just now. Just like he had probably listened to them last night. He sat in a wingchair and put his head in his hands. His little tantrum had just cost him his laptop. He hadn’t known that was going to happen. What was happening to him?

He should call Dinah right now. Could call her. Maybe something was wrong with his dose. Maybe he needed to try something else. Sometimes after a while, one med would stop working, and he would need to try another. Maybe that was the problem. His fingers were shaking. 

No. He couldn’t call Dinah. She had Oliver to deal with right now. Who the hell knew what was going on with him. With them. And who knew what line Oliver had fed her about what had happened, who knew what she would believe, or if she would be angry with him for kicking Oliver out. Well, kicking him out and then beating the shit out of him. Some of that had maybe not been strictly necessary, but what Oliver had said to Hal, what he had done to Hal. . .

_I’ve had feelings for you for a long time, and it’s a problem._

He shut his eyes.

Maybe Hal’s feelings weren’t the only problem. Maybe. . . it was within the range of possibility that his blinding rage at Oliver had been. . . had not been just the anger of an offended host, possibly. The afternoon sun was slanting into the study now, and Bruce sat in it where it striped the chair, tipped his head back and kept his eyes closed. He lost track of time as he sat there, absorbed in the feel of the sun crawling across his skin, lengthening across the room. In the quiet, more than a few things became apparent to him. That was always the way things worked, with him. Other people could understand things instinctively that he could not; they could read people around them, they knew what to say. He required space, and time, and quiet to figure it out. Self-knowledge baked into him with the warmth of the sun. 

_I’ve had feelings for you for a long time._

He roused and looked at the remains of his desk. He had trashed the printer too, apparently; he didn’t remember doing that. He got up and shut the door to the study, leaving the wreckage where it was, and headed out the back door to the barn.

* * *

“Look who’s emerged from his cave,” Clark called as Bruce sauntered down to where they were gathered by the paddock. It was more of what they had been doing earlier in the day – intense hand-to-hand, and Diana and Hal were in the center ring. 

“I’m glad you’re here, man,” Barry said. “These fliers are getting me down. They all wanted to go flying after lunch, and I’m stuck here playing ground game. Hal offered to make me a little green sailboat.”

“Where’s Arthur?”

Barry rolled his eyes. “Where else? He headed to the lake like an hour ago, said he was only going to be gone a minute. Ten bucks says he’s organizing a turtle army.”

Bruce watched the sparring, examining their form. It was something of a mess. Diana was accustomed to relying on her strength, and Hal was accustomed to relying, of course, on the ring. But the rules of this were simple: no super-strength, no powers. Diana was far more skilled than Hal, but Hal was quicker. Bruce winced. If a Robin had showed form like that, he would have been busted back to basic training. 

“I saw that,” Diana called to him, deflecting Hal’s feint with ease. 

“Saw what?”

“That face you made. You disapprove?”

“I think that’s just his face,” Clark said with a grin.

“He thinks he can do better,” Diana said, tossing her stick at him. He caught it one-handed. 

“Not true,” he said. “I know I can.”

“Hah!” she said vaulting over the rail. “Get in the ring, and let us see if your deeds match your words.”

Bruce shrugged, and climbed in. This was not exactly what he had planned, sparring with Hal. He had come out here to be conciliatory, but the man facing him did not look like he was much interested in conciliation. Hal was shirtless and breathing hard, and he was pushing his hair out of his face, readying his stance. “We could take a break first,” Bruce suggested.

“Let’s go,” Hal snarled. Bruce sighed and readied himself. Hal’s first blow was easy enough to parry – not only was the man clearly exhausted from what had to have been at least an hour of hand-to-hand with Diana, but he was also angry, and the anger made him sloppy. Even a sloppy Hal Jordan required his concentration, though – the man was quicksilver fast, and he wasn’t too bad at using Bruce’s greater muscle mass against him. The first few parries and blows accelerated, and soon Hal was keeping the circle of his swing tighter and tighter. Once or twice he came close to landing a blow.

“Careful,” Bruce said, clipping the man’s calf. He could have made it harder if he had wanted to. 

“Fuck you,” Hal breathed. Not loud enough for anyone to hear.

“Let’s take a break,” Bruce said quietly, when they were circling. 

“Shut up and fight. Unless you’re the one who needs a break, old man.” 

Bruce’s jaw tightened. He regretted holding back on that calf-clip. He decided this was going to need his full concentration, and he pressed harder. Their blows were fast now, and the pasture was nothing but the steady _thock-thock-thock_ of their sticks. His world narrowed to Hal’s eyes, and the tells he didn’t know enough to keep out of them. The man was fighting on nothing but anger and impulse. Bruce pushed everything out but his calm center. The next blow landed on Hal’s shoulder, and he staggered. Bruce backed off a few paces, twirling his stick, and let him gather himself.

He was not surprised when Hal rushed him, and he used the force of the trajectory to weaken Hal’s footing. Hal was actually fighting like he had a chance of winning, which was as irritating as it was irrational. “You’re going to get hurt,” Bruce said, pushing him back. 

“Not by you,” he panted. He rushed in again, and at the last second shifted – he was learning that Bruce was reading him. He threw his weight the other direction, and this time he actually did get a hit, in Bruce’s middle. Not very hard, but hard enough to make Bruce grunt, especially since he wasn’t wearing any sort of protection. 

“Good,” Bruce said.

“Spare me the patronizing.” 

“It’s not called patronizing, it’s called training. You’re not bad, but you could be better. If you’d ever let anyone teach you anything, you could be better than good at this.”

“Aw thanks Dad. Suck it.” Hal’s next thrust could have done serious damage, and almost did – Bruce was letting himself get too distracted. He swerved to avoid that vicious upswing, and landed a hit on Hal’s back that knocked him to the ground. Bruce backed off. Hal was on his hands and knees, panting. 

Bruce circled. Hal glared at him. He reached for his stick, and Bruce placed a foot on his left kidney. “That could have ended you,” he said. 

Hal knocked the foot away and surged up, coming straight at Bruce again. The man did not know when to give up. The group over by the fence was still talking, paying only desultory attention – as far as they knew this was just another friendly match. 

The two of them settled into another steady round of blow on blow, and Hal was slowing now, breathing harder. Bruce was feeling it in his muscles too, though he did not care to admit it. He would need to end this quickly, not least because the afternoon was going in the opposite direction from what he had been hoping. Hal was only getting angrier, the set of his jaw more determined. 

He went for a quick weight-shift, and the sweep of his stick knocked Hal off his feet and onto his back. It might even have taken the wind out of him, and he rested there on his back for a few seconds. It would have been the moment for Bruce to step in with his hand extended, but he was feeling a little less conciliatory than he had before the sparring, so he spun his stick and waited. Hal struggled up with a glare at him. 

“Say Bruce,” Clark called, from some sixty feet up. “Did you know there’s—”

Bruce spun and opened his mouth to shout _Get lower, you idiot_ , but the words never made it out of his mouth, because a white wall of pain crashed into him, knocked him flat. 

Several things seemed to be happening at once.

Hal’s face above him. “Fuck!” he shouted hoarsely, throwing his stick aside. “Bruce, I didn’t— _fuck!_ ”

Bruce rolled over and began vomiting into the dirt. The pain clawed at him, rendered everything around him blurry and indistinct. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean— _fuck_ ,” Jordan kept saying, and Bruce longed to tell him to shut up, to stop moving, stop talking, it only made the pain worse, but he didn’t have enough air for that yet.

Clark’s hand was on him, helping him get upright, trying to haul him all the way up. “Not—yet,” he gasped. There was furious indistinct talk happening around him, people moving. He just wanted to lie back down, wanted everything to stop spinning, wanted the sharp dagger of pain to stop. 

“. . .get him to a hospital, now,” Jordan was saying, and Clark was shaking his head, or maybe that was just the dizziness that made it look that way. 

“I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I swear I didn’t—I’m so sorry,” Jordan was back to babbling, and finally Bruce had enough air. “Will you _shut up_ ,” he managed through clenched teeth, and now he staggered up. He tried to gather what was left of his dignity around him, but that was a lost cause. He almost stumbled, and Clark’s arm came to steady him, and he knocked it away. 

“I’m _fine_ ,” he snarled, and started the long walk back to the house. Every step was fiery agony, but if he had to look at the circle of concerned faces, to listen to their voices one more second—

So that was what it felt like, to take a six-foot escrima stick to the balls.


	5. Chapter 5

For reasons he did not care to examine, his injury lent a festive air to the rest of the afternoon and evening. All training was suspended, and everyone gathered in the house, and Bruce was set up in a comfortable chair with a series of varying frozen things pressed to his groin. Barry and Arthur were collaborating on dinner, and Hal was alternating between being as loud and obnoxious as possible in the kitchen, and hovering guiltily around his chair, which made Bruce long to smother him with a sofa cushion. At some point he got the idea that music was what Bruce needed to feel better, so of course he seized Bruce’s phone and plugged it into the house’s excellent sound system, while narrating every bit of music he found, at the top of his voice.

“Holy fuck, I did not know it was possible for one person to have this much shitty music in one place – seriously, all eleven albums of The Who? Like, you had to go back and make sure to download Endless Wire, in case you weren’t bleeding out the eardrums enough already? I mean seriously, why the hell would you buy an album Entwistle wasn’t even on?”

“For someone who hates The Who you sure know a lot about their discography,” Barry pointed out. He was cheating and using his speed to chop the vegetables.

“Fucking finally, I found the Bowie. What are we feeling? I gotta be honest, I’m feeling a little Black Tie White Noise, but I could be swayed. Hey Arthur, I never thought about this, what’s Atlantean music like? I’m thinking endless variations of Enya, tell me I’m wrong. Hey Bruce, you got a text. Who the hell’s Blackbird?”

“Give me my _phone_ ,” Bruce yelled from the living room.

“Themysciran music is far superior to Atlantean music, because Themyscirans were the first to develop harmonic doubled scales,” Diana said. “Everything Atlantis developed was based on Themysciran advances, as is well known.”

“Excuse me,” Arthur said, his brow knitting. “Maybe it’s well known in the propaganda mills that pass for schools on Themyscira, but in a society that prizes free and open inquiry, _actual_ music history is taught. I’m sure the surface world’s music history texts reflect the truth, right Clark?”

“Well. . .” Clark said. “I never. . . I mean, I don’t actually recall. . .” Diana was looking at him expectantly. “Does anything need grilling? I could go do some grilling.”

“Coward,” she said, but the rest of it was drowned in the opening chords of “Glam Slam” and Jordan’s exultant cry. “Check out what I found! Even Bruce recognizes true 20th-century musical genius. Hey speaking of which, should anyone tell him that the 21st century is like, almost two decades in the rearview mirror, and maybe he should consider listening to something produced in it?”

“Will you bring me my damned phone,” Bruce shouted, and this time he picked up the bag of peas on his groin and pitched it unerringly right at Jordan’s head.

“Ow, what the _fuck_ —were those just on your tackle, are you for real?”

“Oh, hey, hand me those,” Barry said. “We need some more greens.”

“What?! We—NO! What the ever-living hell, I am not eating goddamn ball peas!”

“What’s the matter with them? It’s perfectly good food, and look at that, already thawed.” 

Hal began to make retching noises into the sink. “My PHONE!” Bruce bellowed, and Clark plucked it from Hal and chucked it at him without turning around. Arthur and Diana were off into another argument, and now Clark and Barry were laughing at the kitchen sink about something Barry had said quietly to him. _Glam Slam, thank you ma’am_ , Prince was moaning, and the early evening light was slanting into the windows, the way it always did up here, and if his balls hadn’t been throbbing Bruce might have actually been enjoying himself. He let his eyes drift closed. When he had gotten back to the house he had let Clark give him some pain meds, and he had realized that Clark’s rummaging in his suitcase had turned up not the Advil but the considerably stronger stuff. He ought to have said no, but he had swallowed it anyway. 

“Hey,” a soft voice was saying, and he opened his eyes to see Jordan crouched beside his chair. Was it Jordan? Maybe it was Hal. He couldn’t tell the difference any more. There was a warm hand on his knee, warm brown eyes studying him. “How you doing?”

“I’m fine, it’s not as though my legs were amputated.”

“Yeah, I just. . . listen. I know things out there were. . . I was pissed at you, all right? But I swear to God I would never, never in a million years have done that.”

“I am aware,” Bruce said testily.

“Seriously, I am so goddamn sorry. It was just, I heard Clark up in the air, and I spun around to look, and I wasn’t paying attention to the end of my stick, and then you had turned too, and I just—”

“Jordan. It was my fault.” 

“It wasn’t your fault, it was just a stupid accident, and I didn’t—I’m just so sorry.”

“Of course it was an accident. You don’t honestly think you could have landed a hit like that on purpose?”

“Okay, I’m a little less sorry now.”

Clark was leaning over his chair. “Try this,” he said. “You think it needs something more?”

“It needs to get out of my face, what is that?”

“Roasted peppers,” he said, looking offended. “Just try it, tell me what you think.”

“Please just set it down and stop hovering. I’m fine.”

“I know _you’re_ fine, but what about my peppers?”

“Hey,” Hal said. “I’m thinking, maybe we ought to drive you into town, let someone at the ER take a look. I think a scan might be in order here, you know?”

“He’s fine,” Clark said. “There’s extensive bruising, but no rupture.” 

Bruce rested his forehead on his fingertips. "For the love of Christ. You scanned me.” 

“You would have preferred me not to?”

“I would have preferred to live in a world where I did not have to worry about my best friend scanning my testicles.”

“Be kind to my cooking, or I will describe your ductus deferens in excruciating detail,” Clark called over his shoulder, heading back into the kitchen. Hal was still crouched by his chair, and his wry grin as he looked at Bruce was. . . it was hard not to let his mouth twitch in return. 

“I’ll get you some more ball peas,” Hal said, with a slap of his shoulder. 

The mildly festive mood continued over dinner, and whatever poisonous thing had been between him and Hal this afternoon seemed to have drained away. Barry told awful, un-funny stories, and several times Hal caught Bruce’s eye over the table, just that same quick bit of wryness from before, but it gave him a curious lightness in the chest. 

“On Themyscira,” Diana said, twirling a bit of pasta around her fork, “when a sister is injured, the other sisters gather and choose a place on her body that they will injure as well. The idea is, they will increase her pain, and thus her valor when she overcomes her pain. You see even the young ones doing it, because they have seen their elders. One of them will fall and skin her knee, and her companions will gather around and beat her elbow until it is bruised.”

“I don’t like where this story is going,” Bruce said. 

“There is a particular fish,” Arthur said, “with teeth, and if you inject its bite into your arm, you are numbed to pain for three to four minutes. You see children on Atlantis doing this, sticking the bites on their arm and then daring their friends to beat them as hard as they can.”

“Actually, I can totally see people I knew in high school doing that,” Hal said, chewing his salad thoughtfully. 

“For Kal,” Diana said, “we would need a fish that could cause him pain for the same amount of time.”

“ _Or_ , we could have dessert.”

“A cyrenettica,” Arthur said. “The trick would be puncturing the skin.”

“ _My_ skin, not _the_ skin, and could we please try a more normal topic of conversation?”

“Aw, come on, bullshit there’s not a little sado-masochism in you, Kansas,” Hal said with a grin, and Clark balled up his napkin and threw it at him. Bruce watched Diana tuck a smile into her pasta, and Barry reached for the wine – God bless Alfred’s fully-stocked cellar – and passed it around again. Diana took her wine in an iced tea glass, but no one was going to tell her she was doing it wrong. Hal got up from the table and let his hand slide on Bruce’s shoulder in what he now realized was a characteristic gesture for the man – but it felt particular, in some way. 

He felt his phone’s buzz and got up to take it out on the porch, masking the twinge the motion caused in his groin. Of all the idiotic, juvenile errors. Of course, it had been a long time since he had sparred without protection, so that had been part of it. But he had also been distracted, and not just by Clark’s decision to rocket up above the treeline – which, he now recalled, he had never exactly apologized for. He had been off his game for the past twenty-four hours: over-reacting, mis-reading, letting himself make emotional decisions. Twenty-four hours of that would land you with frozen vegetables on your balls. 

“Damian,” he said, when he was out on the porch. “What is it?”

“It’s the Viking,” his son spat. “I refuse to tolerate it one more second, Father.”

Bruce sighed and rubbed at his brow. “The Viking. Are you by any chance referring to your math tutor, Mr. Sigurdsson?”

“Of course. You have no idea the disrespect I have to put up with, Father. You think he’s acceptable because he is always suitably meek when you’re around, but the minute you’re out of sight he becomes deranged. He’s impossible.”

“Deranged, hm. What has he asked you to do this time, your homework?”

“Thirty problems, Father! Thirty of them! There’s no rational reason to have assigned so many. I demand that you fire him at once.”

“Thirty does seem like a lot.”

“Excellent. I will inform the Viking his services are no longer required.”

“Damian. Listen to me. Mr. Sigurdsson is not going anywhere. I have finally found a math tutor who doesn’t quit after two weeks of you, and I have no intention of letting this one go so easily. Also, I think ‘Viking’ may be stretching it a bit for a man who stands five foot four and weighs slightly less than Alfred.”

“Hey Bruce, you want pie? I got peach this time.” Barry had stuck his head out the screen door, and Bruce waved him away.

“Who’s that?” Damian said. “Was that one of the aliens? Who’s there?”

“Just League business.”

“I should be there with you. It doesn’t make sense for you to be in the League if I’m not in the League. Have you spoken to them about me being in the League?”

“Damian, that isn’t going to—”

“I could come train with you immediately. Pennyworth can drive me tonight. What training exercises are you running right now?”

Bruce glanced in the window and caught a glimpse of Barry stuffing a thick forkful of pie into his mouth as he stood over the sink. A gelatinous peach fell onto his shirtfront. “Hard to explain,” Bruce said. “Damian, listen to me. I’ll be home soon, but in the meantime, your training consists of being as courteous as possible to Mr. Sigurdsson, and completing all thirty problems of your math equations. Training is more than physical competency, and I would have expected you to know that by now.”

“But _Father_ , you don’t _understand_ —”

Bruce sighed. Sometimes it was hard to know when he was talking to a small angry assassin, a weapon with feet, and when he was talking to a whining irritated eleven-year-old like any other eleven-year-old, and it was harder to remember that most often, the two of them shared space in the same body. “I will be home soon, Damian. And when I’m home, we will train together. After we do equations together. Understood?”

“Fine,” said the sullen voice on the other end, and Bruce chose to ignore the long aggrieved groan that accompanied it. He clicked off before Damian could backtrack, and studied the dark of the pasture – hardly dark tonight, with the moon as full as it was. There was an undeniable peace to the gentle folds of hillock and field that spread out from the house, and the privacy of the enveloping trees added to the peace. It was ideal for the training facility he had envisioned; he hadn’t been wrong about this place.

Just wrong about everything else.


	6. Chapter 6

That night, he waited.

He went to bed early, and waited for the noises in the house to settle. Clark, who knew his sleeping patterns, had looked up from the poker game he was dealing in some surprise that Bruce was retiring before midnight, but probably he chalked it up to Bruce’s residual soreness. And when finally everyone had stumbled off to bed, and the house’s festive mood had dwindled to a few laughs and backslaps, Bruce waited some more. He paced his room a little, then got out his pad where he kept his schematic scribbles, and worked on those awhile, since he no longer had his laptop. He glanced at the door occasionally.

After about an hour of that, he decided that leaving the door half open might be better than just cracking it. To someone just glancing at the door, it might appear to be all the way closed. He should open it a bit more. So he sat in the chair in his room, and waited. But then he thought that might look a bit too foreboding, and opted for the bed. He stretched full length on it, weighing various positions. There were none that didn’t appear to be making assumptions that perhaps he shouldn’t. Or should he? Possibly he should. He went back to the chair. 

And after a while it began to dawn on him that he had miscalculated. But how? Where had the miscalculation occurred? He reviewed everything that had happened since this afternoon. Had he been wrong about this too? Surely not. The signals had been unmistakable. 

He paced the room, frowning. No, he had not been wrong. But it was possible that. . .

He stopped his pacing, and his frown deepened. _You see it now, don’t you_ , said his brain. 

Ah. Yes, that would make sense. 

For a few more minutes he hesitated. The expectation was clear, but just as clearly, there was no expectation that he would rise to it. And still, he could be wrong.

Bruce left his room on quiet feet and moved silently up the main stairs. He knew better than to allow any floorboards to creak, but still, in this house of extraordinary people, he did not fool himself that his passage was going entirely unremarked.

Which was, of course, the point. 

Jordan’s room was at the end of the hall. If he had been wrong, the door would be closed, like all the others. 

The door was cracked. 

Not all the way open, and not even half open. Barely open at all. Just enough so he could stand there and hesitate yet again. He could turn around and walk just as quietly back down the stairs, and it would never be remarked on, and he knew for a fact they would have no further conversations about this. They would leave the farmhouse tomorrow, and none of this would have happened. It was his choice. 

He pushed back the door, slowly, and stepped inside. The moon was so bright outside that the room was barely even dark. It was light enough that he could easily see Jordan, lying in the bed with his arms behind his head, watching him. He could watch the man’s blinks as he studied him. After a few seconds, Jordan shifted, and pulled back the blankets on one side, and glanced at him. Bruce came closer, and hesitated. He had worn just a T shirt and sweatpants, and Jordan was in a T shirt too, so clearly he didn’t have to strip or anything like that. That would not have been pleasant. He wondered if Jordan usually slept naked, and had put on some clothes on his account. But then that would assume that Jordan both knew he would come, and knew he was not entirely comfortable with nudity. 

Still those eyes were watching him. 

Bruce slid into the bed. Jordan propped on his elbow and scooted closer, watching him, his large eyes intent as they had been last night. There was a hand under the covers, and it came to rest on his arm, and that was when Bruce was aware that he had been trembling slightly. 

“You okay, beautiful?” Jordan whispered. 

“Why do you call me that?” he whispered back. 

For the first time he found Jordan’s eyes unreadable, and he didn’t know if the frown was because he was angry, or something else. _I can’t actually read facial expressions_ , he considered saying, but something told him Jordan would not find that surprising information. “You don’t know,” Jordan said, and his voice was not angry. “You seriously don’t know how gorgeous you are.”

“You’d be surprised how attractive a billionaire is.”

“You’d be surprised how much I don’t give a shit about that.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

There was a buzzing sound from somewhere on the floor, and Jordan sighed. He reached over top of Bruce for his phone, and shut it off, tossing it back onto the pile of clothes. “Ollie’s been blowing up my phone,” he said. “Predictably.”

“So he’s done this to you before,” Bruce said.

“Define this.”

“Turned on you when he’s drunk.”

Jordan’s smile was bleak. “I can take it. It’s been a hell of a year, for him.”

“A year,” Bruce said. “This has been going on for a year?”

Jordan was looking at him strangely. “A year? Ollie’s always been a mean drunk. I’ve been dealing with his shit for a long time. You’ve just never seen it, and that’s because at the end of the day, no matter how blasted out of his skull he is, he knows better than to show that side to you. And we both know why that is.”

A sharp cold thing went slowly up Bruce’s middle, like a long clean blade. _White trash happyland_. He wouldn’t behave like that to Bruce, who he thought of as his equal. He would save all his vicious meanness for Hal – for Hal, who would shrug and forget it until the next time. What Oliver had said last night hadn’t shocked Hal in the least. He had just been shocked Oliver had finally done it in front of other people. 

“Last night,” Bruce said. “You implied he was drinking because he and Dinah were having trouble. But it’s the other way around. She’s leaving because of the drinking.”

“Look at you, ace detective.”

“You’ve been covering for him.”

“Yeah, well, I have some experience in this area.”

Bruce lifted his hand, which felt suddenly very heavy and awkward, and touched Hal’s face. His shaking had stilled. He didn’t know why he had been shaking, before. 

“So listen,” Hal said, and he reached up to grab Bruce’s hand with his own. “Anything can happen here you want. We can make out a little, or we can just lie here instead. Things went a little further last night than I had really meant for them to.”

His cheekbones prickled at that. “Oh,” he said. “I could. . . go, if you prefer.”

“Bruce,” Hal said, and he had not let go of that hand, he was sliding closer. “Hey. No. I was just trying to give you an out, I don’t want you to go.”

“Well obviously I don’t need an _out_ , I’m lying in your bed half-clothed, what reasonable person finds that difficult to comprehend?”

“Yeah well, excuse me for noticing you don’t exactly look relaxed. And as for _half-clothed_ , babe don’t look now but you are actually fully clothed. This is only half-clothed if your idea of _clothed_ is coated in Kevlar armor with only your mouth and nose exposed. Oh wait.” Jordan was smirking at him. 

“You have a problem with what I’m wearing, feel free to fix that.”

Jordan’s smirk became a slow grin. “You’re gonna learn,” he said, “about challenging me.”

“Oh am I.” Their voices had become whispers. Jordan was stretched up against him. He was wearing boxer shorts, and Bruce could feel the heat off his body. Jordan’s eyes were doing that thing they did, where they stayed glued on him like there was something he was trying to see, trying to figure out. 

There was a hand brushing the side of his face. “Wanna kiss a little bit?”

Bruce nodded. Jordan’s lips brushed his. Jordan’s fingers were in his hair, the back of his head. He was so warm. His cock was going to get hard again. That warm tongue was sliding gently into his mouth. Bruce dug fingers into those warm shoulders. “Hal,” he groaned, so much louder than he meant to, and he hadn’t meant to do that, hadn’t mean to say that, surely he hadn’t.

“Fuck,” Hal whispered, and the tongue was pushing into his mouth now, and Bruce ate it, sucked the warmth from it. Hal was half on top of him. They had not kissed quite like this last night. Bruce rolled them slightly, so he could get his arms all the way around Hal. And last night, too, he had let Hal kiss him, let Hal do what he would, but he didn’t feel like that tonight. He rolled them a little bit more so that Hal’s head was tipping back now, and he kissed and kissed and kissed that gorgeous mouth, that wicked irreverent tongue. He licked and ate and bit that sharp jaw, he let his mouth slide down that warm stubbled neck. 

“Fuck,” Hal said weakly. “I want you so goddamn much, _fuck_.”

Hal was yanking his head back and kissing him, now, and somehow Bruce was on his back again – the man was surprisingly deft – and then the weight on top of him was shifting, retreating. Hal was sitting back on his heels, studying Bruce.

“Hey beautiful,” he said. “Can I?” And he plucked at Bruce’s sweatpants. Bruce nodded. Hal tugged, and Bruce lifted, and then he was naked from the waist down, which somehow felt more naked than if his shirt had been off too. Hal was studying him. He was hard. He had not bothered with hiding it, while they were kissing. But it was difficult not to flinch a little, under that steady gaze. 

“Shirt too?” Hal said softly, and Bruce sat up and pulled off his shirt, and lay back down. Hal was silent for a minute, just looking. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said eventually. “You are so fucking beautiful it makes me want to puke myself.” And he lifted a finger and ran it down the thick straining line of Bruce’s cock. His finger brushed against his balls, and his hand gently cupped them. His eyes met Bruce’s. “Still sore?”

Bruce hesitated, then nodded. This did not seem like the place for lies. Hal bent over, and he. . . his mouth was. . . “Ahh,” Bruce gasped, just a soft exhale as Hal Jordan tongued his balls. Not just tongued them: took them into his mouth, gentle as could be. Kissed and licked and teased. And oh fuck. Oh, fuck. He was having a hard time controlling his breathing. There was the tug of the residual soreness, but there was also this other, this delicious other, and it was like having the root of his cock licked, it was—it was indescribable, what Jordan was doing.

“So you like that,” came the soft murmur from somewhere near his groin, and Bruce swallowed, struggled to find words. He could feel the wet leak out the tip of his cock, and he knew Jordan was watching that too. “Looks like you could come just from that, yeah?”

“I—possibly,” he managed.

Jordan was crawling back up his body. “That’s for another time, then. When you’re a little less sore.”

Another time. Bruce seized him and rolled them again, shifting so he had him pinned. He kept his kisses gentle, as gentle as Hal’s mouth on his balls had been. His naked cock was pressed up against the bulge in Hal’s boxers, and with one hand he started pushing the boxers down. Hal helped in between kisses. And then they were cock to cock, like they had been last night and the sudden intensity of it made Bruce lift his head for a minute, stop kissing, try to get his breathing under control. 

“You okay?” Hal whispered.

“Trying not to come on you,” Bruce whispered back, and Hal groaned a little at that. 

“Do it,” he said. “Fucking do it. Goddamn.” Their kisses now were less gentle. Hal’s hands were on his ass. His fingers. He had handfuls of Bruce’s ass like kneading it was all he wanted to be doing. His fingers were digging in. 

“You want it like last night?” Hal’s breath was warm in his ear. It struck him how at every point, and without making a big deal of it, Jordan was asking him what he wanted. Checking in with him every time. Had done it last night too. And it struck him that no one had ever really done that with him. It should possibly have been irritating, but it was. . . not. It was at the same time both unbelievably hot and achingly gentle. 

“No,” he said. “I want it like this.” And he slid down Jordan’s body, to where the boxer shorts were doing a poor job of concealing the stiff cock inside them. So Bruce did the thing Jordan had done, and checked in with his eyes. “This okay?” he said, and Hal’s head fell back. “So fucking okay,” he moaned. 

The thing to do, with any task you were new to, was to approach it in incremental stages. And in truth, sucking a dick was hardly rocket science. The only appreciable difficulty should be gauging what brought pleasure and what did not, and since Jordan seemed physically incapable of keeping quiet anyway, that shouldn’t be too hard. The feel of a cock in his hand was certainly not surprising, but it was a different order of thing to take it in your mouth. Bruce let himself get accustomed by degrees. The sweet taste of the skin was surprising. Hal was uncut, which he had not fully realized in the dark last night, and that gave him some more motion to play with on the up-and-down, which was helpful. It was not, of course, all going to fit in his mouth, but he wasn’t going for the kind of deep-throat suction he knew he wouldn’t be able to manage anyway. He just wanted to bring some pleasure, of the sort Hal had brought to him. 

He seemed to be having some success, to judge by the way Hal kept squirming underneath him. He was making breathy strangled noises, and his fists were tangled in the sheet. It was unbelievably arousing. Bruce shifted to give his own cock some room. He had not thought it would be this much of a turn on, to see this man so unstrung by pleasure. It had to be a spectacularly bad blow job, but in Bruce’s experience bad blow jobs were much like bad pizza, since at the end of the day it was still a blow job. 

“God—fuck— _Bruce_ ,” Hal panted. He was almost thrashing. Bruce pressed the flat of his tongue against the glans, and gave him some harder suction. He let his fingers wander, cradling the heavy sac of balls, brushing lower. Hal’s fingers were pushing at his head, tugging at his hair.

“You have to—have to—oh fuck I’m close—Jesus— _fuck_ ,” he said weakly, and then he was coming, there was come in Bruce’s mouth. This too he had a plan for. He kept his tongue action going, and held the come in his mouth, waiting to swallow till the end, since he suspected repeated swallowing would make him gag, and that would not be what he was going for. But again, events surprised him: the intensity of Hal’s orgasm made his own cock leak and stiffen and ache, and he was so turned on by what he was seeing – what he was riding along with him – that the swallowing was in fact pleasurable. Hal’s hands were all over him, clutching convulsively at his shoulders, his hair. Bruce let him come down slowly, eased him back down onto the bed, because at the end there Hal had pretty much lifted off the mattress. He slowly slid his mouth off, mindful of the over-sensitivity, and stopped to press a kiss to Hal’s inner thigh. 

The man was completely boneless, practically unconscious. So that was what that looked like. Bruce's chest labored under the weight of something squeezing it, something tight and painful and sweet. He lay down beside Hal, watching him, watching his breathing re-settle, his eyes re-focus. 

Hal’s hand brushed his face. And yes, facial expressions were largely inscrutable to him, but there was such a thing as a reasonable deduction, and he could see that what had just happened was not what Hal had expected. He had surprised him. The thumb on his cheek brushed away a stray hair. “Hell of a debut,” Hal murmured, “for your first blow job.”

“How do you know that was my first?”

“Lucky guess,” he said, with a half-drunk smile. The lazy eyes were still watching him though. “If I had to take another lucky guess, I’d say, sure you’ve fooled around with guys before, but probably just for the sake of that oversexed playboy image of yours. Casually bi. Probably a lot of it for show, some pretty boys in a club. You let one or two suck you off. Maybe you even fucked one of the prettier ones, once.”

“Not bad,” Bruce said.

“Mm. You’re not the only detective in this room. ‘Course, I’m really only good at figuring out people’s sex lives, which is a superpower with some pretty limited use. Hal Jordan, Sex Detective. I could give you a run for your money.”

“Not really. How often have you and Ollie slept together?”

Hal was silent, and still the eyes watched him. “Lucky guess,” Bruce said. 

“Still think I’m a good man?”

“Good men make mistakes.”

“’Mistake’ is not really the word for what I did to Dinah.”

“Are you why she’s not here this weekend?”

Hal did look away at that one. “I don’t know. Pretty sure their issues are more than just me. And Ollie and I – it wasn’t like that. I mean, yeah, it’s happened a couple of times. But it was. . . it wasn’t anything more than friends crossing the line.”

“I’m not sure that’s the case, for Oliver.”

“Yeah,” Hal said, still studying the ceiling. “I’m not sure anymore either. Not sure of anything, really.” Bruce was beginning to regret this line of questioning. Wherever Hal was now, it was far away from him. He should get up and go, leave Hal to whatever he was thinking about. Leave Hal to whatever complicated life he was involved in. The ache in his groin had become an ache in his chest, where something hollow now lived.

Bruce rolled over and sat up on the side of the bed. “Hey,” Hal said. “Don’t go.”

“I think maybe I should.”

“Why, because I fucked Ollie? So much for good men make mistakes, huh.”

“Do you love him?” Bruce had not meant his voice to sound like that – so harsh, angry almost. There was silence on the bed behind him, but he didn’t turn to look. Didn’t want to look. Was afraid to look. 

“I think we had a whole conversation this afternoon about how that is not the case,” Hal said, and to Bruce’s shame Hal’s voice was quiet and calm. But the hollow thing in his chest wanted blood.

“You touched Barry,” he said, and he could not make his voice stop doing the thing. “This morning. Your hands were all over him. You—that was a message for me. You wanted nothing to do with me.”

More silence behind him. Bruce’s hands were knots gripping the mattress. “That is some next-level paranoid bullshit right there,” said the same calm voice, and the thing in his chest was in his throat now.

“Yes,” Bruce said. He could have pointed out that his paranoia was diagnosable. That he took medication. That that wasn’t the only mental disorder for which he took medication. That he could call his therapist to verify all this, but since he was currently in bed with her possibly soon-to-be ex-husband’s erstwhile lover, he was not entirely sure if she was taking his calls. 

“Could it have just been that I was as nervous as you, that I didn’t know what to do either?”

Bruce studied the knots of his hands. He did not want Hal to be this reasonable. “Lie back down,” Hal said, and it was not a voice to be disobeyed. So Bruce laid back down, and Hal propped on his elbow, like before, and studied him. He had never thought of Jordan as particularly observant. His eyes were always flicking around a room, never alighting on anything. He was always moving too fast, talking too loud. To see all that energy stilled and focused on him, to see those too-large eyes looking at him and missing nothing. . . uncomfortable was not the word. 

“You and I go better with a little less talking,” Hal said. “Can I try talking another way?”

“What is it—” Bruce swallowed, found his voice. “What is it you want to say?”

“This,” Hal said, and bent to Bruce’s lips, gentle like before. Bruce closed his eyes and let Hal kiss him, let Hal do what he would. It was not an insistent kiss, but it did have a lot to say. It was an explanatory kiss. Hal put a hand on Bruce’s jaw to steady him, and explained further. They kissed quietly, side by side, and for a long time. Hal’s arm was draped across his waist, and Bruce did the same with his arm. On the floor, the phone buzzed again.

“Do you want to take that?”

“No, I do not fucking want to take that. I thought I turned it off. Please just ignore it.”

His body had not forgotten, through all their conversation, what it wanted. Hal’s hands were drifting a bit, stroking. After a while he sat up and stripped off his shirt, and then he was as naked as Bruce. He went to lie back down, but Bruce stopped him with a hand on his chest, and just looked. _Apollo_ , he thought. Warm like the sun, golden brown. Beautiful and dangerous. 

The warmth curled back around him, enfolding him. “Tell me what sounds good to you,” Hal whispered in his ear. “You want my mouth?”

Bruce shook his head. He didn’t know how to say that he wanted Hal’s eyes with him when he came. “Can I touch you some more?” Hal asked, in his ear again, and Bruce nodded. Hal’s fingers on his cock were exploring, stroking. He could feel a callous on one of Hal’s fingers. 

“Hey Bruce.”

“Mm.”

“I’m actually really good with my mouth.”

“I believe you. But. . . this.” And he rested his hand on top of Hal’s, lightly. Hal’s small smile made the warm travel from Hal’s body into his. He wasn’t full hard again yet, but he was getting there. Hal’s hand moved in long easy motions, up and down, and he kept his eyes with Bruce. 

“Hey beautiful,” he whispered. 

“Mmhmm.”

“Your company hires a lot of people.”

“I—what?” He was having an increasingly difficult time tracking. 

“Wayne Enterprises. I figure they hire a lot of people. You could probably sneak me onto the payroll. Because I want a job where this is all I do with my day – just stroke your gorgeous cock all day long. Because in case you did not know this, and something tells me not enough people have told you this, but you have a fucking unbelievable cock.”

Hal’s voice was low and heavy in his ear, and each time he said the word cock a shiver traveled down Bruce’s body. He was relaxing in Hal’s arms, on his back now, Hal’s arm around him, Hal’s hand working him. “I want you to appreciate,” that throaty voice continued, “my self-restraint here. Because right now I seriously want to bend down and taste you, I want to know what it would feel like to have this cock come in my mouth. But you know what I want even more than that?”

“Tell—tell me,” Bruce gasped. 

“I want this cock fucking me. You think you might like that?”

Bruce dug his fingers into Hal’s shoulder, hard. The things Hal was saying made it hard to get air. And then Hal slowed his stroking. Almost stopped it. Stopped, and let just one finger swirl the wet around the head of his cock. Let one finger rub his glans. There was only Bruce’s over-loud breathing in the room. “Don’t come, okay?” Hal whispered, and he hadn’t known until that second just how close he was, how much he needed it.

“Hal—”

“Shhh.”

Bruce grabbed Hal’s wrist, hard, and shoved the hand back on his cock. Held the hand there while he fucked it, fucked it as hard as he needed to. Hal was laughing, low and in his throat. Bruce wanted to fuck that laugh, to fuck that rich, beautiful mouth. His sore and aching balls spilled come, spurted thick and dripping into Hal’s hand, the fingers that gripped him. “Fuck,” he panted, and he let go of Hal’s hand to clutch at him, and Hal kept his hand there, let him keep fucking it. The come felt like it was being pulled from deep inside him, slow and lazy, and he knew that was the bruising in his balls making it feel like that, but it felt so good. He threw his head back and let one more spasm take him, one more slow spurt as he pushed hard into those slick fingers. “That’s it, baby,” Hal murmured. 

He didn’t so much spiral down as drop thirty feet onto a hard surface, the wind knocked out of him. He had Hal in a deathgrip, almost, pinning him. Slowly he disentangled. He should help Hal get cleaned up but he wasn’t sure he had the muscle co-ordination for that yet. Somewhere, Jordan’s phone was buzzing again. Had it ever really stopped? Bruce tilted his head and discovered that from this angle he could see the screen on the floor, glowing in the dark. “Hal,” he said. “It’s Cat.”

“Shit,” Hal said, and made a lunge for the phone across Bruce’s body that landed an elbow in his middle. “Hey! Hey, hey, sorry,” he said into the phone, while still wiping come off his hand on the sheets. “Sorry about that.”

Bruce rolled his eyes and tried to shift, but Hal was lying across him. “No, no, I’m—yeah, I’m sorry. I’m good, I swear. I promise. Better than good.” A pause, and Bruce tried to make out what the voice on the other end was saying, but Jordan must keep his volume low. He had a pilot’s preternatural hearing. 

“Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean to worry you. I know I said I’d call. I just—it was kind of a day around here. But in a good way. I’m. . . really good, honestly.” He still had the phone pressed to his ear, and he. . . let his head drop onto Bruce’s midsection while he listened. It was an unexpected bit of intimacy, and what was most surprising was how not unpleasant it was. But that was Jordan for you: nine thousand violations of personal space per second.

“Mm hm,” he was saying. “Well, I kind of have to go. Because—because I do, that’s why. No, no, I’m not. I’m not, why would you—Cat, I swear I am not having _sex_ , for God’s sake. I will—I’ll—I’ll call you when I’m back in town, I swear things are good, gotta go bye now,” he ended, and tossed the phone back on the floor. 

“Convincing,” Bruce said.

“Well it wasn’t technically a lie. I wasn’t actively having sex _at that moment_. Sex had already been had.” He rolled over, but kept his head where it was. Tentatively, Bruce lifted a hand and rested it on that thick mane of hair. He let his thumb stroke a little bit. Jordan’s eyes were drifting shut, like a cat’s. 

“If good men make mistakes,” Bruce mused, “what exactly are we making here?”

“The apocalypse,” Jordan mumbled. His eyes were shut, hands folded contentedly, and he clearly had every intention of falling asleep right there. Bruce should nudge him off. Should collect his clothes and go back downstairs. Should do anything other than lie there and keep stroking Jordan’s head. But he couldn’t quite locate the part of him that cared about any of those _shoulds_ , or wanted to do anything other than lie here with the heavy weight of Hal’s head on his middle, watching the slow rise and fall of his breathing. The moonlight glinted a little off the ring on his right hand.

The apocalypse, indeed.


	7. Chapter 7

Bruce woke in the middle of the night, with the slow inexorable swim to the surface he was used to. Insomnia held no more surprises for him, just a dull weariness at its sameness. He knew better than to fight it by trying to stay asleep, so he let wakefulness wash him onto shore, and he stayed where he was for a long time, watching the ceiling. They had moved in their sleep, and Bruce was slightly less entangled now, though there was a heavy leg across his, and his left arm was a bit pinned. And then a glow caught his eye on the floor near the bed, and he eased himself out from under Hal – the man appeared to gain about twenty-five pounds of dense muscle mass in sleep – and reached for the glow. 

Jordan kept no lock or password on his phone, of course. There was trust, and then there was sheer idiocy. Bruce sat up, quietly, and swiped the phone open, reading the most recent text. 

_You little shit,_ it read. _I guess you think this is some kind of fucking hilarious, not answering any of my texts you dickweed?? Fucking rot in hell you self-absorbed piece of shit you never cared about anyone other than yourself since you were old enough to walk we are fucking done. You fucking ruined my life asshole._

Oliver. Bruce’s chest tightened. He replayed the sweet moment of his fist across Oliver’s face, and imagined the pleasure of doing it again. There were thirty-nine unread messages from Oliver. Bruce opened them all.

 _I am so fucking sorry man I don’t know what’s happening to me I won’t try to call any more I just want you to know how fucking fucking sorry I am,_ read the text directly before his most recent one. _You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want, I’m just so sorry man._

All the messages were like that: alternating between groveling apologies and angry threats, and when his groveling met with no response, the verbal aggression escalated. Moments where the Oliver he thought he knew would be visible, for a fleeting second, and then it would be back to the filth-spewing abuse. And more than the abuse: the anger. Oliver’s life was clearly falling apart in ways that had entirely escaped Bruce before this weekend, and just as clearly Hal was the focus of all of that, in Oliver’s mind. Holding onto Hal and Hal’s friendship was a way of holding onto the version of himself he preferred, but if Hal disappointed, then all that rage was turned on him.

How long had Hal endured this situation? 

Bruce took screenshots of the worst and most abusive texts, and sent them to himself. He was absorbed in the screen’s faint glow, and was momentarily blinded by the brighter green glow that closed on his wrist, squeezing until he dropped the phone. Hal’s eyes were level on his. “Let go of my wrist,” Bruce said. 

“You mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing?”

“Listen to me. Oliver Queen is a dangerous man, and he intends to hurt you. Ignoring him and dismissing the threat he poses is a foolish mistake, and I’m not going to allow it.”

“Oh is that so,” Hal said. Bruce noticed the green vise on his wrist had if anything tightened. “You’re not going to allow it. Let me explain exactly what you get to allow and not allow in my life: fucking nothing. So don’t you ever open your fucking mouth and tell me what you’re going to allow. Ever again. Are we clear?”

“Hal,” he said. “He can and will hurt you. You think you can manage him, that you can handle him, like you’ve been doing all year, and maybe longer. But he’s not the same man you once knew. I know what danger looks like, and if any part of you trusts me, if any part of you listens to me or believes me, then believe this: Oliver Queen is a dangerous man.”

“He’s a _drunk_ , and when people drink they do and say things they don’t mean, all right, so stop turning this into some paranoia-fueled bullshit when all the man needs is some rehab to—”

“Hal! This is more than just the alcohol, and you are being an idiot to— _ahh_ ,” he winced, and “ _Shit,_ ” Hal said. The green vise that had suddenly tightened was gone, and Hal was instantly at his side, rubbing his wrist. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Jesus Christ, I’m the dangerous one, I’ve hurt you twice today when I didn’t mean to.”

“Well, you meant that a little.”

Hal lifted his wrist and kissed it, resting it against his face. “Bruce,” he said. “You have to trust me to handle Ollie, okay?”

“I made a mistake once,” Bruce said, “and someone I loved died because of that mistake. Because I miscalculated, because I underestimated.”

“Bruce. You paranoid deranged motherfucker. I am not your kid, and I am not in need of protection. I am the most powerful force in the fucking known universe, with the possible exception of the guy sleeping next door, okay? Sure, Ollie’s a powerful guy, but let’s be honest, I am not in any danger from a drunk with a bow and arrow, no matter how pissed he gets. So dial it down, Batdad.”

Hal was still holding his wrist against the side of his face. Bruce said nothing. Hal would think what he would. His ring would protect him from every threat from the next galaxy, but his arrogance would blind him to the threat right beside him. “How about this scenario,” Bruce said softly. “Oliver Queen, in one of the many interviews he gives, reveals the identity of the Green Lantern. He doesn’t have to prove a thing. All he has to do is say it. You think he needs to throw a single punch to destroy your life?”

“Give me a break, you seriously think Ollie would do that? Come on.”

“I think a man with his back against the wall will lash out. I think he hates you maybe as much as he loves you, and maybe as much as he hates himself right now. Hal. You think I exaggerate the threat because of what’s between us, but believe me when I say you are minimizing the threat here.” 

It was Hal’s turn to be silent. He let go of Bruce’s hand, gently. He studied it on the sheet beside him. “Actually,” he said. “I think you exaggerate the threat because of your screwed up inability to perceive reality, but while we’re on the subject of the _what’s between us_ part of that sentence. Maybe we should. . . look. Some things are great for vacations, you know? Like Aloha shirts. But they don’t work so well back in the real world. What I’m trying to say is—”

“Yes, I’ve parsed your complex metaphor. That does not in fact have anything to do with my point, which you are trying to deflect.”

“Bruce—”

“Oliver is suspended from the League, indefinitely. That decision will only be revisited after he’s been through rehab, and then only conditionally. Your name will not be mentioned in this decision, but it’s not up for debate.”

“And this would be why it’s Clark’s name along with yours on those goddamned by-laws, because this is you making unilateral decisions and relying on him to suck your cock. You want to back Ollie into that wall? Then go right ahead, try booting him out of the League and see what happens then. I have no idea what he’ll do but I fucking guarantee you, you do not want to see him with nothing left to lose. Dinah, me, _and_ the League? But I’m the idiot here, right, tell me another.”

“And your solution is? Other than continue to take his abuse, and wait for him to do serious damage to himself or someone else?”

“My solution is, let me talk to him. Dinah and me, together. We can get through to him, but there is no fucking way you will do anything but make a bad situation worse, the minute you open your mouth. Bruce, stay the hell away from him, trust me that you are like a lit match to him. Nine-tenths of why he lost it like that the other night was because you were watching.”

Bruce rubbed at his eyes. They had long since ceased whispering, but Hal lowered his voice now. “You’re going to have to trust me here,” he said. “This is not me signing up for the all-expenses-paid Masochistic Enablers Vacation Package, all right? I know what I’m doing. Dinah and I will handle this, like we always do, and we will be able to help him. We will.”

Bruce said nothing. There wasn’t any response possible when the only thing he wanted to say was, _I no longer give a shit about anyone helping Oliver, I only want you safe._ “Hey,” Hal said, tugging at his arm. “There’s a whole shitty world out there waiting for us to get back to it tomorrow. Can we just keep forgetting about it, for a few more hours? Is that a thing we could do?”

Bruce let himself be pulled back down beside Hal. Hal was doing that thing he did, propping on his elbow to look at him, wry little smile in place. They rested there, watching each other. “There’s something I forgot to tell you,” Bruce said, after a while.

“And what’s that?”

“You are quite probably the most beautiful person, man or woman, I have ever seen. That’s why I asked why you called me beautiful.”

“Wow,” Hal said. “I don’t know what to say. That means a lot, coming from someone I have to assume has seen Clark naked.”

Bruce snatched the pillow from behind Hal’s head and pressed it to his face with deadly intent, climbing on top of him to pin him. It didn’t suppress the laugh underneath it, and Hal’s strong legs curled around his and rolled them so he was on top, tossing aside the pillow. Bruce noticed he didn’t move his legs though; just kept them locked with Bruce’s own. Hal’s soft naked cock was nestled against his own. “So when Barry went to the store,” Hal whispered. “I might have had him pick up some stuff for me.”

“Is that so.”

“Mm.” Hal bent to Bruce’s neck, and that wicked mouth licked a hot trail down from his jaw, then started on the other side. Bruce was panting before he was done, and the slow back-and-forth rock of Hal’s groin against his had him hardening. 

“So tell me,” Hal said, and the mouth was at his ear now. Hal would know by now what that did to him. “Is fucking too intentionally gay for Mr. Casually Bi?”

Bruce pulled the mouth roughly to his own, and shoved his tongue in that evil mouth, pushed his cock up into the heat of Hal’s. He could feel Hal’s heavy sac resting against his own, the soft nudges and embraces there mirroring the nudges of their tongues. His hand gripped the back of Hal’s neck, dug in. “Tell me,” he groaned. “Anything you want, just tell me.”

“I told you what I want. You feel like driving?”

Bruce’s groan this time didn’t have words. His hands couldn’t touch enough, hold enough. He worried he was being too rough, but Hal was right there with him, and the roughness felt as good as the gentleness had before. And there was a drumbeat in the back of his head: remember this, remember it. Don’t forget the taste of his mouth, the feel of his fingers digging into your back. 

Hal might have called it driving, but there was very little that Bruce was in control of. Hal coated his fingers with slick, Hal guided his fingers to his hole, Hal showed him wordlessly what he wanted. _I’m not the virgin you so obviously think I am,_ he contemplated saying, but he would not break whatever spell this was, and in truth he enjoyed having Hal take charge. It was the only way he could be sure he was bringing him pleasure, and that was the only thing he wanted: wanted desperately to see Hal’s mouth open in pleasure, his head tip back, his eyes slide shut. He wanted to see Hal come, wanted to see the moment of his pleasure and know that it was because of him. Needed to see it. 

“So we’re gonna try this way first,” Hal whispered, climbing on top of him. “And then we’ll shift. In the interest of total transparency, this is not my usual. So we’re gonna go slow.” He reached across Bruce for the shiny pack of condoms, which unfolded in a long string of some thirty-of them, and Bruce arched a brow. 

“Optimistic,” he said. 

“Barry likes to shop the sales.”

“I’m trying not to think about you asking Barry to bring you condoms and lube.”

“Why? Barry doesn’t give a shit. He is the most un-shit-giving person you could meet.”

“He didn’t ask you why you might need these?”

“Nope, and he wouldn’t. But since we’re on the subject. Using these is your call. I’m good either way.”

Bruce hesitated. Hal tore off one of the packets and bit it open. “Because we are possibly the two most medically examined persons on the face of the planet, is all I’m saying. But this is not me pressuring you either way—this is just me saying bareback’s fine too, if you’d prefer.”

Bruce reached up and plucked the foil packet from Hal’s hands and tossed it overboard. “Oh thank fuck,” Hal said, and bent to his mouth. Their kisses were getting rougher, hungrier. Hal reached behind him and grabbed Bruce’s cock, then lifted and re-settled. He lowered himself inch by inch. Bruce did not move, hardly dared to breathe. He tracked the motion behind Hal’s closed eyes. After a few minutes, Hal stopped. His fingers were digging into Bruce’s shoulders in a way that was a few clicks beyond pleasure. 

“Hal,” he whispered.

“Hmm.”

“Let’s not.”

“Shut up.”

“Sweetheart, stop.” The endearment fluttered Hal’s eyelids open, as he knew it would.

“Yeah, okay,” Hal said. “Different position. That’s just a little too deep, is all.”

They rolled so Hal was on his back, and then those powerful quads were around Bruce’s waist. Bruce ran his hands up and down those thighs. He wished he could articulate what he thought about Hal’s body, and about those thighs in particular. He ran his hands from the width of chest, to the narrowness of waist, then to the thick flare of thigh and muscle currently wrapped around him. _Beautiful._

Bruce went slowly, and he watched Hal’s eyes, which were open now and with him. He reached for some more lube and was gentle with his fingers, the pressure. He eased in, but about halfway he shut his eyes and paused, because the intensity of sensation was not something he had been prepared for. 

“Ever barebacked?” Hal whispered, and Bruce shook his head, his jaw tight. 

“So here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna fuck me, is what. Come on, enough with the slow, let’s go.”

“You talk a good game,” Bruce said, his throat a bit tight too. 

Hal breathed out, and Bruce could feel the loosening of all his muscles as he relaxed around him. “Yeah,” Hal murmured. “Okay, there it is. Fuck.”

Bruce slid all the way in, and held there. Hal’s eyes were back open. Bruce shifted slightly, hoping for a better angle, but there was a fleeting wince on Hal’s face as he moved, so he quickly stilled. Hal was running his hands up and down Bruce’s arms. “We stop whenever you want,” Bruce said softly. 

“I know.”

It was odd, but he had somehow thought this would be more intimate, more erotically charged, than the things they had done before. But it was as though everything he thought he knew about sex and his body – which was, in fact, a not inconsiderable amount – got reversed and turned around with Hal. Fucking Hal felt amazing, felt wonderful, but it was the same _them_ as it had been before, the same small smile on Hal’s face as he watched him, the same care with each other’s pleasure. They went slow, and kept quiet, and let their hands wander. He could not get enough of touching Hal’s thighs. After a while he unwrapped those powerful thighs from his waist, and bent them back, and shifted up, and at that Hal made a noise he was uncertain about.

“Fuck,” Hal gasped. 

“No?”

“Oh Jesus _yes_ , shut up and fuck me.” He let himself go fast then, but not too rough – small motions, just faster. And after a few minutes of that he abruptly stopped, and dug his fingers into Hal’s thigh, turned his face away, tried to get control. “Gonna come?”

Bruce shook his head. He would be fine if he could pause every now and again. It was just the heat – all of Hal’s incredibly warmth, and now he was inside it, now it was inside him too. The thick muscle wrapping his cock, the firm hands pulling his ass closer. “Hang on,” Hal said, and the hands were pushing at his chest now. He pulled out with a gasp, and Hal flipped over onto his stomach, pulled a pillow to his chest. “Like this,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, come on.”

Bruce sank into him again, and this time the noise Hal made was unmistakable. He could feel Hal flex around him. Hal was moving too now, rubbing his cock against the mattress, getting some friction going. “You want my hand?” Bruce whispered. He was snug against Hal’s back now, so close, pressed right up against him, against that glorious ass. 

“Just fuck me,” Hal panted. “Oh fuck.”

“I won’t. . . last, like this.”

“Fucking let go, come on.”

“Hal.” He pressed his mouth to that beautiful shoulder, pushed his cock even deeper. He could feel the moment when Hal came, and not just from the tight squeeze around his cock, but from every shuddering muscle of Hal’s body. He didn’t warn him to be quiet, didn’t want him to be quiet – he wanted everyone to hear, everyone to know what beautiful sounds Hal was making because of him, because of fucking back into his cock, and Hal was making soft panting sounds as he pressed back against Bruce and then forward. Bruce watched his fingers claw into the mattress. 

“You coming?” Bruce whispered into his neck.

“God— _fuck_ —” Hal’s orgasm seemed to go on forever, and Bruce was selfish, he wanted to feel more of it. He didn’t think he could press in any harder, but he did. Hal’s arm flung around, gripped his ass, held him there. The fingers raked into his ass, and Bruce opened his mouth for air, and bit Hal’s shoulder. He was coming, coming when he didn’t mean to, coming because of that hand squeezing his ass, because of the sweet weight of Hal underneath him, the pressure of his balls against Hal’s, Hal’s ass warm against the root of his cock. 

Bruce shut his eyes and let it happen, let his come spill out into Hal, who arched his neck back and this time said “ _fuck!_ ” so loud they would be lucky if police in the neighboring county didn’t call the house to see if everything was all right. Bruce didn’t care. They stayed like that, shuddering against each other, the room full of only the rasp of their breath. Any second now, Hal would ask him to move, but he was physically incapable of it—his own orgasm was still slowing down, still happening in odd corners of his body. He rested his forehead on the back of Hal’s head. Hal’s hand was still resting on his ass. 

Slowly, he shifted. He caught the hiss of Hal’s breath, and his small flinch, and he stopped. “No?” he whispered. 

“It’s fine. Just slow. It’s just—slow.”

He was as careful as he could manage, massaging when his cock finally slid out, hoping the pressure of his thumb was at least pleasant. Hal rolled over and Bruce wrapped his arms around him, and there were arms tight around him too. They said nothing, but drifted there. Bruce kept his head buried in Hal’s neck. He would have thought Hal was asleep, he was so quiet, but he knew from his breathing he was not. And this too was odd, because he was accustomed to a post-coital drowsiness and sprawl, but this was different – their arms were if anything tighter around each other, and they were both awake. Hal’s hand was on the back of his head, a small stroking that also pressed Bruce’s head closer into his. 

“Hey Bruce.”

“Yes.”

“I know what has to happen here. It’s just that maybe I can’t.”

Bruce shut his eyes. Something clawed at his throat. “I have an idea,” he said hoarsely. “Everyone leaves in the morning. Stay up here for a bit longer. However long you can. We can have another day or so.”

“Okay,” Hal said, and there was a slow spread of warmth in Bruce’s chest, and there was no more dull cold dread of tomorrow, but only sunlight inside of him. They would have a day, at least. A day, if nothing more. And then the day after that they would walk out of here and pick up every burden they had set momentarily aside, and they would inhabit the real world again, and this thing would not be a part of that world. But in the dark, wrapped in Hal, around him, beside him, it was easy to believe that world was far away, and would never come. 

For a little while.


	8. Chapter 8

“So I’m wondering if you would mind if I didn’t drive you back,” Bruce said, over his coffee. He was sitting on the side porch with Clark, the one that looked over the fields toward the barn, and they were watching Barry load his duffel in Arthur’s car, while the two of them argued about packing and appropriate use of available space. Arthur’s car was kind of a mess, and things kept spilling out of it when he opened the doors. A diet Coke can rolled a short distance down the driveway. Barry was shaking his head and trying to demonstrate space minimization techniques, and Arthur was nodding and chasing the Coke can and clearly ignoring everything Barry was saying. 

“Oh?” Clark said. “Everything okay?”

“Yes. Just a few things I need to take care of up here, before I go back. It could be a while before I’m up here again.”

“Oh. Okay, that’s no problem. I actually took work off through Tuesday, so I can stay too.”

Bruce took another swallow of coffee. “I see,” he said. 

“Maybe I can even help out around here, fix up the barn a bit more. We can rent some movies and spend some time together. I think this sounds great.”

“Ah,” Bruce said. “Well. . .”

Clark broke into a wide grin. “Just kidding,” he said. “That was way too easy. Bruce, I know why you’re staying. Don’t worry about it, Diana and I were going to fly home together anyway.”

Bruce sighed. “Enjoyed that, did you?”

“Immensely.” Clark downed his coffee and headed to the kitchen door. He gave Bruce’s shoulder a bone-crushing slap before he went, though. “Oh, come on, I think I get to drag you a little here. I have it coming.”

“Fair,” he said. 

“About Oliver,” Clark said. “I stand by everything you said. As far as I’m concerned, he gets within fifty yards of Hal again, I’m drop-kicking him to the rings of Saturn.”

“Some people might consider eavesdropping a little less.”

“Some people might consider being a little more quiet. Bruce. Seriously. You’re not the only one who has Hal’s back.”

“I know.”

“Okay then.” The screen door slammed behind him, and Bruce sat there for a minute, watching Barry and Arthur, by now openly bickering as they slammed car doors and threw in the last of Arthur’s luggage, though luggage was a euphemistic term for a man who appeared to have done his packing in grocery sacks. The screen door squeaked again, and Clark’s head reappeared.

“The thing is, I didn’t _intentionally_ listen, it’s just that there’s next to no insulation in the dry wall on the second floor, and I kept waking up, and I swear I did try not to listen too much.”

Bruce laughed. “Get out of here,” he said. “Go pack. If there’s anything you want me to bring back, throw it in the car and I’ll drop it off at your place tomorrow.”

“Oh good,” Clark said. “I hate carrying stuff when I fly.”

“What do you mean? Nine times out of ten you are carrying a person when you fly.”

“Trust me, that looks better than me toting a canvas boatbag and a weekender duffel. It is impossible to look cool while doing that.”

“Clark. You are flying through the air. I promise you, it looks cool.”

Clark laughed and went back to the kitchen. Bruce listened to him humming a little through the open window, as he put away the last of the dishes—all the small domestic sounds of the last day of vacation. Clark Kent, ever the considerate houseguest. 

By ten o’clock, Clark and Diana had lifted off, and Barry and Arthur had finally squabbled their way down the driveway, and then Hal was closing the front door and leaning against it with a smirk. Bruce was reading through some e-mails from Lucius on his phone, finishing up his last bit of work. “Well well well,” Hal said. “Looks like it’s just you and me.”

Bruce tossed his phone on the sofa. “Does it now.”

“Mm hm. And what I’m wondering is. . . whatever shall we do with ourselves?”

“Whatever indeed.”

Kissing in broad daylight, in the middle of the house, while standing up, felt more dangerous than anything else they had done. Such a simple prosaic pleasure, to stand in the middle of a room and kiss someone. Bruce reached to take off his glasses, and Hal’s hand stopped him. “How about not,” he said. 

“How about not what?”

“How about you don’t take those off.”

Bruce frowned. “You don’t want me to take my glasses off? Why?”

“Because maybe I like them.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Did you just tell me my fetish was ridiculous? Seriously?”

“That’s not a fetish, that’s just poor taste.”

Hal sighed. “Okay, we’re going to have a rule today, about talking. Talking can only happen in the immediate twenty-five second window after orgasm. You got something to say, you have to make me come my brains out first.”

“Challenge accepted,” Bruce said, and pulled Hal’s mouth back to his. 

The first time was on the sofa. Or at least, that was there they started. But as it turned out the sofa was not very large, and they actually were, and it was difficult to maneuver. Bruce rolled them inadvisedly, and they landed on the floor. It was not so bad for Bruce, because Hal broke his fall. “Ow fucking ow goddammit,” Hal moaned.

“Bed,” Bruce said. 

“Bed,” Hal agreed, and Bruce helped him up. They made it to his bed on the first floor, and then kicked, clawed, tore off what was left of their clothes. They knew each other’s bodies better now, and knew what worked for them and what didn’t. The previous night’s hesitation and fumbling were gone. Hal got those legs around him, and Bruce got himself slicked up (lesson from last night learned: there was no such thing as too much lube) and Bruce slid into him with minimal difficulty, and then Hal was clawing at his arms and saying things like _fuck fuck yes Jesus Christ you feel so fucking good fucking fuck me_ and the house was full of their groans. Bruce got his fingers in that hair and yanked Hal’s neck back, sucked on that glorious neck as he fucked and rode him and pushed into him.

“Oh Jesus—Jesus _fuck_ ,” Hal hissed, and then Bruce realized he was coming, his beautiful thick cock spurting onto his belly between them, his neck arched back in a rictus of pleasure, his arms shaking. “ _Ahhh,_ ” he cried out, still shaking, and Bruce stilled, transfixed, watching him. And then he started fucking him again, faster.

“Show—show me,” he panted. “Show me how you do that, Christ, that was— _Hal_ ,” he moaned. Hal had come without a hand on him, come on his cock alone, come just from getting fucked, and it had been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and the hottest, and Hal’s belly was covered in slick pools of the come that had spilled out him. Bruce spurted inside him, long and deep, knowing his own groan was shaking the rafters of the house, but nothing, nothing had ever felt this fucking good, it felt like he was emptying not just his balls but his whole body into that tight muscle.

He wouldn’t let go of Hal’s neck, wouldn’t stop biting it, eating it. His fingers wouldn’t let go of Hal’s hair. He was still inside him and didn’t care. “Never going to stop fucking you,” he murmured.

“Meetings will be. . . awkward,” Hal murmured back, his voice a little blurred and soft. 

“Don’t care.” He let himself slide out slowly, mindful of Hal’s wince. There was enough sensation left in his cock that he felt another shudder at the slow withdrawal. He wanted to lick up the come on Hal’s stomach, to lick his own come out of Hal’s body. Would Hal stop him? Was there anything he could to Hal, with Hal, that Hal would say no to? He pulled Hal’s mouth back to his and began eating that too, unable to stop, unable to taste enough. He climbed on top of Hal and let the come between them smear on his body too. He wrapped his arm around Hal’s neck to hold him closer, would not stop kissing him. 

“We’ve got all day,” Hal whispered, but it didn’t feel like that to Bruce. It felt like there was only this, right here, and he did not know how to express that, how to explain the desperation that was shaking his spine, licking at his bones. He would never get close enough, because what he really wanted was to crawl inside Hal, for every part of him to be inside every part of Hal.

“Beautiful, I’m not going anywhere,” Hal said in his ear, and Bruce was shamed, that Hal could feel his desperation like that. But then Hal was kissing him too, kissing him the same way Bruce had kissed him, and maybe it was the same for him too, maybe it was. 

They came down slowly, and Bruce found his head resting on Hal’s chest, Hal’s hand stroking his head. “Your jacket,” Bruce said into the warm skin beneath him.

The hand paused. “My what?”

“Your jacket. You like my glasses. I like your jacket.”

“My. . . flight jacket?”

“Mm hmmm.”

Hal sat up a bit, shifted his head, though he was still cradling it. “Really,” he said. “So, if I were, just hypothetically and for the sake of argument, wearing nothing but my flight jacket, that would be an appealing mental image to you.”

Bruce shook his head. “No,” he said. “I want you naked and touching yourself while wearing the jacket. I want to see you spread on your bed, wearing nothing but the jacket, coming into your fist. I want to fuck you while you’re wearing your jacket.”

“I do not want come on my jacket. Your fantasy makes me nervous.”

“I know an excellent dry cleaner.”

Hal raised a bleary head. “Hey,” he said. “You took off your glasses.”

“Yes, about twenty minutes ago. I’m not going to get jabbed repeatedly in the temple just to satisfy your daddy kink.”

They drifted in silence, and Bruce let his eyes slide shut. They had not actually slept much last night, and he had been up early this morning. His body wanted to pull him back into the warmth of the bed, the warmth of Hal’s body. “Don’t actually have one of those,” Hal said softly above him. 

“Hmm?”

“A daddy kink. Not my thing. Don’t pull that shit, is what I’m saying. Not judging, some guys like it. I don’t, is all.”

Bruce’s eyes were wide open now. “I know,” he said. They were quiet, and Bruce found Hal’s hand beside him, pulled it to his chest. 

“I mention it because I don’t like to be held down. Just in case you were thinking about it at some point. Pretty normal thing to like, but it’s just not my scene.”

Hal’s voice was easy, his hand still steady on Bruce’s head. Bruce shut his eyes and let himself imagine the indescribable sweetness of his fingers, slowly crushing the skull of everyone who had ever hurt Hal, of whoever it was who lay behind Hal’s studied easiness of voice when he talked about being held down. The blood and pulp that would ooze between Bruce’s fingers, the crunch of bone, the sound of a throat suffocating on its own blood and swallowed gray matter. _Burn burn I will burn them all, you tell me who to kill and they will burn while you watch, tell me which death would please you best and it will be theirs_. But he said none of that, of course. He just tightened his grip on Hal’s hand, and they lay there with the morning sun spilling across their bodies. He might even have slept a little bit, and jerked awake when Hal shifted. 

There were days that stayed with you forever, and if you were lucky you knew you were in one of those days when it was happening to you. The sunlight of that day was somehow more intense, and it wasn’t just his imagination – it was the intense sun of early fall, right before the weather got serious about turning cold, as though the sun was trying to spend itself in a last glorious burst of warmth before the coming chill. Even the damn weather was metaphorical. 

They fucked on pretty much every surface in the house, though they tended to end up back in the bed. The kitchen turned out to be surprisingly workable—they were tall enough that kitchen counters were just right, and the kitchen table was even better. Investing in the sturdy farmhouse table had been an excellent idea. “Hey Bruce,” Hal said, in the middle of their most recent bout on the table. 

“Yeah?” His mouth was busy working it was around Hal’s jaw, the base of his throat. 

“Ever been fucked?”

Bruce lifted his head. “Not by a man.”

Hal started laughing, low and down in that delicious throat. “Fuck yes,” he moaned. “Fucking tell me it was Selina, just tell me.”

“It was.”

“Jesus Christ. I’m gonna come just thinking about that. Tell—tell me. Was it good?” Hal had a hand wrapped around his cock, and much as he had loved feeling Hal come hands-free on his cock, watching the motion of his hand was even better—Hal’s calloused brown hand jerking that gorgeous cock, knowing he was seeing Hal’s pleasure as Hal wanted it, even as he was fucking him, making him groan with each upthrust. . .

“So good,” Bruce gasped. He fucked him harder into the table, lifted his thighs a bit more. “It was. . .unbelievable.”

“Did she—did she come?”

“Oh yes. Quite a. . . few times.”

“And you?”

Bruce lowered his voice. “Like a fucking firehose.”

“ _Bruce_ ,” Hal groaned, and there was thick white come coating Hal’s fingers as he jerked himself. Bruce lifted one of his come-soaked hands and sucked on the fingers, and Hal was still coming a bit, groaning even louder as he twitched and spasmed on Bruce’s cock. Bruce eased out, setting his legs down gently, rubbing at his thighs. Hal cracked a semi-conscious eye. “What’re you doing? You’re not done.”

“I’m good.”

“What the hell’re you talking about, you could drive nails with that thing, come here.” Bruce scooted closer to where Hal lay sprawled on the kitchen table, and Hal gripped his cock. “Hey, idea, climb on,” Hal said, and Bruce complied. He straddled Hal’s chest with his knees, which was only possible given the length of his own quads – Hal’s chest was not a small thing. It still had come smears on it, or maybe that was from the time before, he wasn’t sure. 

“That’s it,” Hal said, working him with his hand. Bruce let his eyes slide shut, let himself relax into those wondrously deft hands. He wasn’t sure how Hal managed it, but his hands seemed to go unexpected places, find places on the topography of his cock that decades of his own exploration had not uncovered. “See, what’s awesome about you is, you are really all about the basic low-maintenance hand job. I mean in your case, it’s really more of a two-hand job, isn’t it.”

“Mm,” Bruce said. He wasn’t really tracking anything but that hand, and how he could fuck into it. Did wanting to fuck Hal’s callouses count as a fetish, or just a fixation? Hal’s hand was surprisingly slick, and for a second or two he wondered if Hal had sneaked more lube, but then he realized he was fucking the come still on Hal’s fingers, he was fucking Hal’s come, and that made him open his mouth and pant with pleasure. His come mingled with Hal’s, it would be both of theirs dripping from his fingers. 

“Of course, in any hand job, it’s all about where you put the other hand, wouldn’t you say?” There was a slick warm pressure at his hole, and he relaxed into it, bearing down to give Hal access. 

“You are a natural, aren’t you,” Hal murmured. “No wonder Selina couldn’t wait to give it to you.” Hal’s fingers were as deft inside his body as outside it. The pleasant pressure had become quite a bit sharper, as Hal’s finger found the gland. Somehow he knew enough not to rub, but just to press, to press harder, to press until Bruce gasped and tipped forward.

“There we go, baby, just let go, let me milk you a little,” Hal said. His other hand kept up a steady up-and-down on his shaft, and his orgasm was not like what he had felt before – it was a slow unstringing of his insides, and it kept going, not spurting but dribbling out of him, come splashing down on Hal’s chin, sliding down his neck.

“Fuck,” Bruce gasped, wrung for air, and Hal arched up and tongued the last bit of come off his cock. Bruce gave another inelegant groan as Hal’s hand eased out of him – and yes, apparently that had been a little more than just a finger inside him. Bruce’s arms were shaking, and it wasn’t just because they had been fucking instead of eating all day long. Hal’s hand had rearranged him, somehow. He collapsed heavily down on the table beside Hal, and they stared at the ceiling fan together. There was a dull cracking sound from one of the legs, and suddenly the table was resting at about a thirty-five degree slope.

“Well, that was predictable,” Hal said.


	9. Chapter 9

They foraged later in the afternoon, rummaging through what was left in the fridge to find something edible. “Did Barry cook this?” Bruce lifted a glass container, squinting at what was in it, but Hal was making it a little hard to maneuver. He was sucking on Bruce’s neck, more or less draped around his back, and Bruce kept laughing and trying to disentangle himself. 

“If I don’t come up with something for us to eat, we are going to pass out from fluid loss,” Bruce pointed out. 

“Mm,” Hal said. “I think I’ve got something to eat right here.”

Bruce reached around his 190-pound succubus for a fork on the counter. “How many meals do you skip on a regular basis?”

“Hypocrite. How about I call up Alfred and ask about some of your habits. Turn around, I missed a spot.”

“Jordan,” he sighed, but he complied, and let himself be pressed back against the fridge. He took a forkful of pasta salad over Hal’s shoulder. “This is not bad,” he said. Hal was licking a path up the side of his neck, and Bruce nudged him. “Eat,” he said, pushing the fork at his face. Jordan snatched a bite off his fork and went back to his job hoovering up Bruce’s skin.

About mid-morning they had decided that clothes were no longer necessary, which added to the day’s air of unreality, of stepping outside everything he thought he knew about the way the world and his body worked. But whatever had led him down a path to standing naked in a kitchen, pressed against the fridge eating forkfuls of pasta salad while getting his cock sucked by the Green Lantern, had to have been a series of good decisions. “You really ought to try some,” he said, chewing thoughtfully, and Hal looked up. 

“My mouth is a little full right now.”

“Semen is not a meal.”

“Well not with that attitude.”

Bruce laughed, and reached to set the bowl on the counter beside him, but the suction on his cock had increased at the critical moment, throwing off his depth perception. The bowl tipped off the counter to the floor, spilling pasta bits down the cabinet, but Bruce didn’t care. He leaned back against the fridge and buried his hands in that beautiful hair, giving himself over to the rising tide of sensation. He knew his body well enough to know he could indeed come again, and apparently so did Hal, because he was now sucking with deadly intent. Bruce let his weight slide forward a bit, letting Hal support his knees because Hal could take it. 

From somewhere, a phone buzzed. The counter, maybe. Bruce glanced over and saw that it was Hal’s. He winced when he saw the caller ID. “Hal,” he said. “I know I’m going to regret saying this, but it’s Cat.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Jordan sighed, and he rose lightly, fumbling across the counter for the phone. Bruce’s cock ached. He should have just kept his mouth shut.

“Hey,” Hal said into the phone. “Hey, Cat, I’m so sorry, I know we were supposed to have lunch today, I realize I might totally have forgotten to call and cancel, please do not hate me forever.”

Bruce sighed. He ought to clean up the pasta, but if he did that Jordan might assume it was okay to stop blowing him, and it truly truly was not. He stayed where he was and looped an arm around Jordan’s hip while he talked, letting his hand stroke that gorgeous muscled ass. Hal glanced at him with a smirk. That certainly appeared to be permission. So while Hal talked, Bruce kept caressing, and he let himself start kissing along collarbone and neck. Hal’s hand was absently stroking the back of his neck. 

Bruce reached a hand down to cradle Hal’s sac, and Hal widened his stance slightly to give him a little more access. Hal was semi-hard, and Bruce ran a finger along the top of his cock, testing for tensile strength and resilience. “No, sure, that sounds great,” Hal said. “And I swear I will catch you up when I get back to town.”

Bruce let his finger bounce Hal’s cock a little bit, and the hand on the back of his neck slapped the side of his head. Bruce laughed quietly. “No—no, Cat, I swear to God, I am not avoiding you, I am not lying high in a ditch somewhere, would I answer the phone if I was tripping? No, I know I scared you the other night, but believe me—”

Bruce snatched the phone. “Cat Grant,” he said. “This is Batman. Yes, how are you. Hal is with me. He’s fine, I promise you. He’s just a little busy right now, so he’s going to have to get back to you later. Have a wonderful day.” He clicked off the phone and tossed it into a fruit basket.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” Hal choked out. “Motherfucking pigshitting son of a _bitch_ , did you just—are you out of your _fucking_ mind—”

Bruce pulled Hal’s mouth to his and started kissing him, saying everything he had meant to say all day, all weekend. Since maybe long before that. He felt the moment of Hal going boneless, of Hal letting himself be kissed. Bruce’s thumbs stroked Hal’s jaw while he kissed him, cradled his face. There was prickly stubble beneath his fingers. Neither of them had troubled to shave today. It was time they didn’t have. 

“Bruce,” Hal breathed. 

They didn’t make it to the bed this time. Hal fucked him on the kitchen floor, face to face. “That feel good, beautiful?” Hal whispered, and Bruce came in a choke of sound, ashamed at how he shook.

* * *

They slept in occasional snatches, and woke to the other’s hands touching, brushing, kissing. Bruce finally collapsed on the soft pile of the living room rug, in a long streak of sunlight. Hal’s heavy arm was across him, and he had slept too. Bruce woke first, and watched Hal as he slept. Memorized. 

He did not intend to forget what Hal Jordan looked like, sated, asleep, naked, unshaven, sunlight slanting across his long body. You might think his hair was brown, but shot with sunlight you could see how wrong you were. There were flecks of gold all through it, and there was a reddish cast at the roots. The browns were not all the same brown either: there was warm chestnut entwined with lighter notes that skated almost into blond at points, wound together with ash browns. It was in need of a trim; probably he was a few weeks behind on getting it cut, and there was more fall to the heavy wave of hair than there usually was. 

No hair on his chest to obscure the line and swell of muscle, or the elegant cut of his hips. A body in perfect proportion, like a Greek statue. A pair of the most powerful quads he had seen on anyone, even Diana. His thighs flared with muscle, and Bruce wanted to run his hands down that lean elegant line, from chest to narrow hips to bulging thigh. All this body’s beauty, however, did not obscure the other fact that became clear to him, as he was studying: Hal was underweight for his frame. Easy to miss, because of the strength of muscle, but there it was. He had laughed to himself earlier about his 190-pound succubus, because that was the weight listed in his file, but it was clear that was an ideal which Jordan maybe hit on occasion, and not any accurate measure. He probably hovered somewhere in the 180s, which was too lean by half to support that kind of muscle mass. Too lean by far in the hips. He should get up and go heat something in the kitchen, see if he couldn’t entice Jordan into eating a little something. 

“Hey,” said the warm voice, and Bruce found those eyes resting on him, that small sleepy smile watching him. There was a whole new territory he hadn’t sufficiently memorized: the dark lake of brown that was Hal’s eyes. He had studied the overly long lashes, but not what lay behind them, and Bruce lay back down now to get to business studying his eyes, and the subtle variation of color within them. 

“What’s up,” Jordan said, still sleepy, a hand stroking Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce said nothing, only watched him. He got the feeling Jordan was watching him back. 

“Not actually blue,” Jordan murmured after a bit.

“What?”

“Your eyes. Everyone thinks they’re blue. They’re not, are they. More of a gray, they’re so pale. Only really blue at the edges.”

Bruce tucked himself into the circle of Hal’s arms, and Hal spooned behind him. He contemplated going back to sleep like that. He ought to get something from the kitchen. “Hey Bruce,” Hal said, into his neck.

“Mm.”

“Just theoretically, I’m wondering if we might revisit that metaphor.”

“Oh, you mean the one where I’m the cast-off and slightly embarrassing item of clothing acquired on vacation?”

“Y-yeah, that’s the one.”

“Well,” Bruce said. His head was resting on Jordan’s arm. The hair on it wasn’t the same shade of brown as his head – it was much more golden, much closer to blond. It matched the hair at his groin. “However unflatteringly expressed, you weren’t exactly wrong.”

“I only meant,” Hal said, “that I get how much this is not your usual thing, all right?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, this whole weekend is probably more gay-ness than your allowable lifetime maximum. And look, you don’t have to be gay to get off on gay sex.”

“It probably helps.”

Hal whuffed a laugh. “Look, all I meant is—”

“Stop,” Bruce said. He turned to face him. “Stop making outs for me that I didn’t ask for. You want this to end after today, that’s fine by me, and I’ll abide by whatever you want. That was the agreement. But have the balls to tell me that’s what you want, and stop telling me what it is that I want.”

There were fingers ghosting the corners of his hairline, brushing back imaginary hairs. He kept his hair too short for that. “Beautiful,” Hal said, “do you get how much you terrify me?” 

“Do you get how much it’s the same for me?”

“Starting to,” Hal said. 

“Well how about this,” Bruce said. “We take it nice and slow. We head back to town, and later this week, say Thursday, we meet and talk about this some more. We can hold regular meetings about it, if you like. Over dinner. I know a few nice places in the city. And then after these meetings we can go back to the penthouse, and fuck until we pass out, and we can continue to talk about it. When we wake up we will fuck some more, and then we can keep talking about it all you want. We can even talk during, if you want.”

“I see. This is an interesting proposal.”

“If that’s what you want it to be, I’m game.”

Hal blinked at him. “Jesus Christ,” he said. 

“Cards on the table,” Bruce said. 

“I’m supposed to be the fearless one.”

“Well, there’s a new game in town.”

“You don’t say.” Hal stretched, swallowed a yawn. “So what you’re saying is, you’re a sure thing.”

“Do I need to rent a billboard?”

“Excellent. Imma sleep for a bit more then, because not to embarrass myself here, but you are wearing me right the fuck out.” He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes again. “What does it say that the living room rug in your vacation home is about ten times more comfortable than the actual mattress on my bed at home?”

“One of.”

“Hm?”

“One of my vacation homes. I’m just saying, when you’re thinking about my offer, you ought to keep all the available data in mind.”

Hal laughed with his eyes closed, the low-in-his-throat laugh that went straight to Bruce’s groin. “Crazy-ass motherfucker,” he said. 

“Yes,” Bruce said solemnly, thinking of the prescriptions stashed in his suitcase. That too was available data to be kept in mind, but Hal was wrong about the fearless thing, because he didn’t point that out. 

“C’mere, crazy.” Hal was tugging him closer, so that Bruce was draped across him. 

“I liked it better when I was beautiful.”

“Well, we’re moving rapidly on from the wooing portion of this relationship.”

“Is that how it is then.”

“Oh no,” Hal groaned. “I forgot. This is not comfortable at all. What the fuck do you even weigh? Are your bones made of solid rock? How many metal plates are in your skull?”

Bruce re-settled so even more of his weight was on Hal, who groaned louder and gave a slightly strangled laugh. 

They dozed some more, and Bruce was the last to wake this time – Hal was standing and tugging on his hand. “C’mon,” he was saying. “I need to show you something.”

“Mmmf,” Bruce said into the carpet. Who the hell, outside of his eleven year old, woke someone up by pulling on one of their limbs? The light was dimmer in the room – he must have slept longer than he had thought. 

“C’mon, get your lazy ass up. It’ll be worth it, I promise. Come on.”

Reluctantly, Bruce stumbled up. Hal still had hold of his hand and was leading him through the kitchen, out the side door. They stood on the side porch, looking out over the fields. Still Hal was holding his hand. Such a small simple pleasure, to hold someone’s hand like this; he couldn’t calculate how many years it had been since he had done something like this. Over the tops of the trees, the sky was a blaze of pinks and golds, as the day crept toward sunset. “We’re still naked,” Bruce murmured. 

“Yep.” Hal turned to him and put his arms around Bruce. “Hold on tight,” he said. 

“Jordan, _no_ —” Before the rest of it was out of his mouth, they were in the air, hovering at the roofline. Bruce sighed. “We haven't got a stitch of clothing on, and if anyone were to—”

“Shhh. Just trust me.”

Hal floated them toward the field a little. It was. . . not like being transported by the Lantern Force had been, before. This was different. Instead of being detached from Hal, he was part of him, connected to his body. He was being held close enough that the ring was reading him as an extension of Hal’s skin, and the green glow that enveloped Hal was also enveloping him, spreading across his skin, and he was. . . warm. Shot through with warmth. Finally, for the first time in his life, warm. Warmth not just inside his skin, but inside his veins, pumping through his heart, caressing him from the inside. There were no words. He gasped for air and warmth poured into his lungs. 

“Is this—is this what it’s like for you?” he managed.

“It is,” Hal said, his forehead resting on Bruce’s. “Give it a minute, if you’re not used to it.”

The warmth was spreading down his legs, wrapping his feet. The warmth curled around the root of his cock, pooled in his groin. “God,” he gasped. 

“You like?”

He held on tight to Hal. “This is. . . indescribable.”

Hal’s smile spread across his face. “It is, isn’t it? I forget sometimes, since I’m so used to it.”

Bruce felt his cock hardening in response to the sensation. The warmth was delicious. It was strange how intimate it felt – like slipping on Hal’s skin, almost. More intimate than anything they had yet done. Bruce lifted his hand, and it glowed green against the setting sun. He spread his fingers, watching the green shimmer along his skin, flow from him to Hal and back again. 

_There’s this feature too,_ Hal said. Said it, and yet didn’t say it. Said it inside Bruce. He met Hal’s eyes in shock.

_Yeah, didn’t actually know if this would work. Too much?_

In answer Bruce slid his hand around Hal’s neck and tipped his mouth closer. _Can you. . . hear this?_ Bruce tried, while they were kissing. 

_Loud and clear, baby._

Hal pulled off and studied Bruce. “I actually brought you up here to show you this,” he said aloud, nodding at the sunset gilding the tops of the pines and elms. 

“It’s glorious.”

“You didn’t even look.”

Bruce’s thumb was stroking Hal’s sharp cheekbone, the strong clean line of his jaw. “Yes I did,” he whispered, and bent for another kiss.

_How much are you going to pay me to never ever let on that you are a complete hopelessly romantic sap?_

_I will pay you in blowjobs._

Hal bent back his head and laughed, and Bruce kissed the laugh at the base of his throat.

* * *

“So we really should eat actual food,” Hal said, surveying the contents of the fridge. “Also, fuck no I am not going to stand in front of the fridge with no clothes on.” He strode into Bruce’s room without bothering to shut the refrigerator door.

“Jordan!”

“I’m coming right back, stuff a cock in it.” He re-emerged with a pair of Bruce’s sweatpants slung low on his hips, and crossed his arms in front of the fridge, frowning at it. “Don’t guess there’s any chance of pizza delivery out here.”

“We’ll make do.” Bruce opened his mouth to make a remark about the sweatpants not fitting him, but shut it again as they slid down a little further on Hal’s hips. 

“I could give Barry a call. It would take him like, what, five minutes to make it up here and run pick us up a pizza? I bet he wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m betting that he would, in fact, and I happen to value our privacy a little more than that.”

“Oh, right, our privacy, yeah. This would be the same Barry who bought us condoms and lube?”

“Bought _you_ condoms and lube,” Bruce pointed out. He opened the cabinets and contemplated cereal for dinner. There was a little bit of granola left over, and an entire box of Frosted Flakes. Clark. 

“Right, because what, he assumed I was going to be fucking the horses? Bruce, this is doomed, we’re going to starve to death. I seriously can’t cook.”

“Well, neither can I.”

“What do you mean, you can’t cook? Your kitchen is the size of a soccer field, have you ever even fucking visited it?”

“Someone gets cranky when he’s hungry.” 

“ _Someone_ shouldn’t have spilled all the pasta salad on the floor.” 

“Here,” Bruce said, opening the freezer. “Frozen vegetables. Heat them up while I get some clothes on, you’re making me feel underdressed.”

“Hey no, you don’t have to do that,” Hal called after him. “I’ll run the heat up instead, it’ll be fine, you don’t have to put on clothes! Hey, wait a sec, were these on your balls at any point?”

“Your tongue has been on my balls at many points, what are you complaining about?”

“That doesn’t mean I want your balls on my _food_ , Jesus Christ. Are you sure we can’t just order pizza?”

“Shut up and stop complaining,” Bruce said, pulling on a pair of jeans. And they did end up cobbling together a decent enough meal, if green beans and granola cereal could be said to be a meal. He would have to make sure Alfred kept this place more fully stocked, if the League was going to be using the farmhouse regularly. He rummaged around in the basement and found an excellent bottle of wine, though it was hard to know what would pair best with their makeshift dinner. And in fact, it was one of the better dinners of his life. They stuffed a few books under the doubtful kitchen table leg, and the wine dwindled as they talked and as the darkness outside got thicker, and with a few leading questions Bruce got Hal talking about the newest experimental tech he was flying, sketching the wing schematic on a napkin for Bruce to take a look at, talking a mile a minute about the aerodynamic interface, his hands moving faster even than his mouth, and Bruce just savored his wine and watched him, smiling. He knew the questions to ask to keep Hal talking, and he watched those quick deft hands as they sketched, and he did not fool himself that this was an evening he would ever forget. It was an instinct that never went away, if once you had known a great loss: pay attention to this small thing, and that one. Who knows if it will be the last? His brain stored things in ways that normal brains, possibly, did not, born from some deep distrust he would never un-persuade it of, some deep belief that behind every happy evening lurked blood and shadows and screams, waiting to snatch it from you. It was why he found Christmas Day so distasteful; his paranoia level was always through the roof by the end of it. 

Maybe it hadn’t even been his parents; maybe it had been Jason. He could remember the night before Jason’s death, which had been a normal one, back at the hotel in Sarajevo. They knew they would be on patrol the next day, that there was work for Batman and Robin to do, but that night Jason had ordered room service and they had watched some ridiculous movie Jason had chosen. Bruce could tell you everything that happened in that movie, and the exact taste of the overpriced cheeseburger under its silver dome.

“And then all the rainbow unicorns flew away and said, come back to Ponyvale soon, Green Lantern.”

“Sorry,” Bruce said, rubbing at his face. “I was. . . sorry.”

“’S okay,” Hal said, squeezing his hand. “Let’s get cleaned up. In more ways than one, maybe. I don’t know about you but I need the shower to end all showers. Clear the table, Little Prince, and I’ll wash up.”

Bruce told him about some ideas he was entertaining for modifying the Javelin, while they cleaned, and Hal grimaced occasionally, explaining why choice a wouldn’t work, or choice b was totally impractical, and choice c just revealed that he knew next to nothing about interstellar travel. It was while he was scrubbing the dishes and expounding on the possible merits of choice d – with significant modifications – that Bruce came up behind him and just rested his arms around Hal’s waist, and his head on Hal’s shoulder. Hal turned and draped his arms around Bruce. They kissed lazily, and Bruce could taste the salt from their over-seasoned green beans on his lips. 

“Stop tempting me before we’ve had that shower,” Hal murmured. 

“Ain’t that just pretty as a picture,” said Oliver’s voice at the doorway. 

They had had the water running, and some of Hal’s godawful musical choice in the background, or they would have heard the car on the gravel, Oliver’s step on the stair. Or maybe not: maybe they had let their guard down so far today that they had stopped listening to peripheral noise. Maybe Oliver had not wanted to be heard. But instantly they disentangled, and Hal stepped forward. 

“Ollie,” Hal said. Bruce noticed he positioned himself between them, but at enough of an angle to keep Bruce in his corner sightline. Hal could say what he liked about Oliver being no danger, but he clearly didn’t believe it. Bruce stayed where he was, leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed.

“Guess now I know why you were too busy to return my calls,” Oliver said. His voice was quiet and calm.

“I had some pretty good reasons not to return your calls, asshole. What the hell are you doing here?”

Oliver glanced at him. “Evening, Bruce.”

Bruce said nothing. “Yeah,” Oliver sighed. “I figured that was what I would get. Look, I’m just here to get some of my stuff, all right? And. . . for what it’s worth, I know I was out of line the other night. I get that.”

Hal was nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s one way to put it. Look, Ollie. When I get back to town, we need to talk. You’ve gotta get some help, man, and I’m gonna be there to help you do that.”

“Just as soon as you get your lips off Bruce’s cock, am I right?”

Bruce shifted, but held himself in place. He did nothing but keep his eyes on Ollie, tracking every twitch of muscle. Hal was silent too. “Right,” Oliver said. “That would be the part that’s none of my business.”

“Get out of here,” Bruce said softly, and he caught the clench of Hal’s fist at that. _Like a lit match_ , Hal had said. 

“Sure,” Oliver said, glancing between the two of them. “I ain’t here to make anybody hate me more, believe me.”

“Nobody hates you, Ollie. You are my friend and you always will be.”

“That so. How about you, Bruce? Any undying love you feel like swearing?”

Bruce was silent. “Thought so,” Oliver said, his eyes narrowing. “Well, looks like this week’s League meeting is gonna be all kinds of fun.”

“You won’t be there,” Bruce said, and Hal’s head whipped to him, and Bruce heard the exhale of his _Jesus_.

“And why is that? You gonna kick me out?”

“No, that decision is from Clark and me together. You will voluntarily enter a rehab program until you dry out and become human again, and then the decision will be made about whether to re-admit you or not.”

“And who’s gonna be making that decision? Let me guess, that’s you and Clark too.”

“No, in fact. That will be Hal’s decision.” 

“You wanna shut up?” Hal’s voice was low, but his glare at Bruce was deadly. “Look, Ollie, this is all stuff to talk about another day. The only thing we need to be talking about is getting you into some treatment. And yeah, I’m pissed at you, but you’re my friend, and that doesn’t change. Look into my eyes and tell me that’s changed for you. Come on man, look at me.”

“Good cop bad cop, huh,” Oliver said, his voice still quiet. Bruce wondered if he was sober, or if sober was a relative term these days. “Whatever man. I’m outta here.”

“Ollie—”

“Nah man, I’m good. Whatever, just forget it. Forget it. You guys just go back to what you were doing, that looked like some kind of fun.”

“Ollie,” Hal said again. “Come on.”

“You do have a type though, don’t you?” Oliver was glancing from Hal to Bruce and back again. “First me, then him. I mean. . . not to put too fine a point on it.” He turned to the screen door, and gave one backward glance at Hal, with a little smirk. 

“I guess old habits die hard,” he said, and he was out the door, and the screen door didn’t bang behind him, because he closed it quietly. 

Hal stood there, his eyes studying some point on the floor that only he could see. Bruce stayed still while they listened to Ollie’s car door shut, his engine start, the spray of gravel as he headed down the long drive. Still Hal hadn’t moved.

“Hal,” Bruce said.

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Yeah, let’s get cleaned up.” And he was back at the sink, finishing his rinsing like nothing had happened. The room looked the same as it had five minutes ago; nothing in it had changed. Everything in it had changed. Hal was drying his hands. 

“I’m gonna get my stuff packed up,” he said, and headed to the stairs. “Might as well start cleaning up upstairs too.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, but Hal was already up the stairs, already out of reach.


	10. Chapter 10

Bruce sat by the lake and nursed his beer. Nursed was possibly too benign an expression, since it was his third beer, but after all it had not been a very filling meal. The beer tasted sour in his mouth and worse in his stomach, but he kept sucking it down with a kind of resoluteness. There was next to no moon tonight, and the lake was hushed. It made it easy to hear the crunch of leaves on the path behind him. 

“Found you,” Hal said lightly.

Bruce said nothing, just took another swig of his beer. He had slipped on a shirt before he came out here, but hadn’t needed a jacket. His skin had still felt slightly warmed from the Lantern force, before. So he had been right about that surmise, at least. 

“Listen,” Hal said. “I think I’m gonna lift off and head on home. I’ve got to be on flight deck at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning anyway.”

Bruce scratched absently at the label on his beer bottle. 

“I’ll give you a call when we get back home, all right?”

“No you won’t,” Bruce said. He just kept watching the lake. Jordan turned and looked at the lake too. He wasn’t in Bruce’s sweatpants anymore. He’d changed to his own clothes. He was probably all packed. 

“Listen, Bruce,” he began, turning to face him. “You and I, we’ve got a lot of—a lot of things to work through here, and—”

“Can you not,” Bruce said evenly. “I don’t doubt you have thought about what you’re going to say, and I don’t doubt it is very reasonable and well-constructed. But I’m asking you not to. Please.”

Hal had his hands on his hips, and he was chewing his lip now. “You just want to not talk.”

“Yes. That is what I want. That is the thing I want. You have put your finger on it.”

He saw Hal glance at the beer bottle. “You’re a little drunk.”

“Yep.” He took another swig.

“Okay.” Hal was nodding, studying the dirt and leaves packed at their feet. “Okay. If that’s what you want.” He started for the path back around the lake, and Bruce watched him. 

“Coward,” he called after him. 

“Okay, there it is. Excellent. My weekend has not been full enough of mean drunks, so thank you for that.”

Bruce hurled his bottle into the lake, with all his strength. He heard the deep _thunk_ of it, out in the middle of the lake. Arthur would kill him for that. “You think I’m like him,” he said. “That’s what you think. That’s what he made you think, that’s _exactly_ what he wanted you to think.”

“So much for not talking, huh. Bruce, come on. What the fuck did you really think was going to happen here? You thought this was, that we could—for fuck’s sake, you and me, we can’t even make it down the driveway without imploding, did you really think we were going to have some kind of chance in the real world?”

Hal was pacing now, his hands running through his hair. Bruce remembered what it felt like to touch his hair. He wouldn’t again. “Yes,” Hal said, “yes, I’m pissed that you could not keep your fucking mouth shut around Ollie, and that you all but goaded him, but that is not even the point. That’s not even—that is not the thing. I have obviously got a hell of a lot of shit to be dealing with right now, and hell, your life, I don’t even want to think about how complicated that is, and you and me. . . that was never gonna be a good idea, for about a thousand reasons, and you know it.”

Bruce was wishing he hadn’t thrown away his beer. It had also possibly been four beers, not three. He leaned back in the chair and shut his eyes. He couldn’t track what Hal was saying, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter anyway. He knew what it meant, even if he didn’t follow all the words. 

“This is not how things work,” Hal was saying. “We’re too alike. You said it yourself, back when we first met. People, all right, people need to be with people who _aren’t_ like them, people who help them become _better_ people. I have a shit ton of my own issues, I do not need to be taking on your fucking _raft_ of crazy, if the pharmacy stashed in your suitcase is anything to go by, all right?”

He was glad his eyes weren’t open for that one. If only he were drunk enough to pass out. But four beers wouldn’t get him there, not even close. “Let’s go back to the not talking, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. He hated the hoarseness in his voice.

“I didn’t mean that,” Hal said. “That—I should not have said that.” He heard Hal pacing some more, scuffing through leaves. Finally there was silence, and Bruce opened his eyes. Hal was staring out at the lake again.

“Go on home,” Bruce said. “Do what you want to do. We’ll talk later.”

“No we won’t.”

“No, probably not,” he agreed. 

Hal stood there in silence for a bit more. Hal had his hands on his hips again. Bruce would not forget what those hips had felt like under his fingers. “Yeah,” Hal said. “All right.” 

This time when he started back around the lake, Bruce did not stop him. He settled into his chair and closed his eyes again, and he might even have slept. He had a dream that he was sitting in the chair, and he tried to get up, only he couldn’t because there was a long metal pipe impaling him, right through his chest, right through the chair. He was struggling to get up, and couldn’t. Somehow in his dream he convinced himself that that was the problem – that maybe the giant hole in him could be fixed if only he could get himself up and pull out the pipe, if only he could get the right leverage. People kept walking by, but they kept not seeing him, sitting there bleeding out. He called to Clark, but Clark only thought he wanted more cereal. There was a green mist between him and everyone else, they couldn’t see or hear him or understand what he was saying. The blood was pooling on his stomach, and it was hard to get air. 

He woke to suffocation, with a start. The lake was still dark. He sat up from the chair quickly, half expecting to feel the weight of that metal shaft in him, pinning him. Of course there was nothing holding him down, it had all been a dream. But the weight in his chest was not.

* * *

He didn’t head back to Gotham that night, even though he had slept off the alcohol. It was two in the morning, and he might as well just stay here and leave when it was light. He stumbled into the house, and past the kitchen, which he tried not to look at, through to his bedroom, before he remembered what a bad idea that was. So he opted for the sofa in the living room, and fell on that. 

There wouldn’t, of course, be any more sleep. _I’m sorry,_ said his brain. _Were you hoping to get some rest? How about I just replay the last twenty-four hours for you instead, in excruciating detail. How would that be?_

“Fuck you,” he muttered. 

Objectively speaking, Oliver’s evisceration had been a thing of perfectly calculated beauty. He had to know Hal inside and out, to aim right for the sweet spot like that. _Whore_ , Oliver had said, without ever having to use the word. _Whore._ And Hal had stood there like he was the one who had just been impaled on the spot, frozen. 

Perfectly played, on Oliver’s part. There had been nothing Bruce could say, after that. No way to call Hal back from whatever headspace Ollie had plunged him into. The detective in him had all the pieces now, all the sorry shitstorm of Hal’s adolescence before he got his service appointment. It was funny how certain facts obscured certain other facts. He had had the information in Hal’s file about his pilot father, and his death when Hal had been young, and from those facts Bruce had assumed a certain middle class blandness and stability. He had never troubled to dig further. He had not known about the poverty, had not known about the trainwreck that was Amber Jordan or her meth addiction, had not known what Hal had had to do to keep them fed and housed. And that was what Oliver had taken and used against him.

_Why don’t you get up and have another drink. Not much food in the house but you know what the stock in the basement looks like. There’s still some of that brandy left. Why don’t you do that._

“Shut up,” he said into the dark. 

He could call Clark. Could call him up right now. Clark would answer. _Hey, what’s wrong?_ Clark would say. And Bruce would sit there on the phone and not be able to think of what to say. _He left,_ he could say. _He walked out._ And in the half-second pause, Bruce would hear Clark arranging his words. He would hear the utter lack of surprise in Clark’s sympathetic voice even as he rolled away in the bed so he wouldn’t wake Diana, and Clark would say something like _oh no, man that’s rough, I’m so sorry, do you want to come over?_

No, Clark wouldn’t be surprised at all. No one really would.

_The pharmacy stashed in your suitcase._

Well, they’d had a good run. It had been an excellent thirty-six hours, and that was honestly about the extent of his ability to maintain a relationship anyway. It was really more efficient this way: all of a relationship’s benefits and disadvantages, crammed into a highly condensed period of time. No sense dragging things out. In the future, perhaps he could be more specific with potential partners. _Look,_ he could say. _I only have about thirty-six hours to spare for this relationship, so we will need to have electric physical intimacy, unexpectedly profound connection, and explosive fights that uncover previously unsuspected emotional vulnerabilities, following by more scorching hot make-up sex. Be sure you open up to me in ways you haven’t really with anyone else, just to add that extra soupçon of total devastation at the end. Got that? Okay, let’s go. We’re on the clock here._

He rolled the other way on the sofa and shivered, tucking his arms tighter. 

In the kitchen, Hal had stood between him and Oliver, with Bruce in his sightline. Hal had been trying to protect him, guard him. _Coward,_ Bruce had spat at him. 

Before Jason, he had been able to cry. Had cried. He was too dead inside now, too broken. Hal had been right. _Raft of crazy._

An idea struck him. A need. The old need. The need that never changed. He fumbled for the phone in his pocket before he could stop himself, hit the number. Told himself he was just going to listen to the voicemail greeting, like he sometimes did. There was no way he would answer. Just to hear his voice. “Bruce?” came the voice, wide awake of course. Three in the morning. 

“Bruce? Are you there? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he said, swallowing against the hoarseness in his voice. “Nothing. I’m—I can ask you about it later. Never mind.”

“Bruce,” Jason said. “What the fuck. What’s wrong.”

He was silent. “I bought a farmhouse,” he said. “I was thinking you might like to come see it, at some point.”

“Ah. . . okay. You mind telling me what the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing is going on. I just wanted to let you know it was available to you, if you were interested.”

“Okay. That makes sense. I can see why you’re calling me up at three in the morning to talk real estate. Is this some kind of code? Are we having a coded conversation? I don’t happen to have my crazy-ass Bat-decoder ring handy, so I don’t know what ‘bought a farmhouse’ is supposed to stand for.”

Bruce laughed, shortly. “Go back to bed,” he said.

“Wasn’t in bed.”

“Well, you ought to be.”

“Aww, you do care.”

“Good night, Jason,” he said, and clicked off the phone, tossing it on the floor. He turned over again, burrowing further into the sofa, and it was possible he drifted a bit. Sometimes he could do that. Sometimes he would awake in the middle of the night, and his brain would say, _He’s dead. He’s still dead, he was never alive again, he never came back, you hallucinated every bit of it, he’s dead and always will be._ He could try reasoning himself out of it, but by the time he did that, he was awake anyway. Jason probably thought the occasional random middle-of-the-night phone calls, if he bothered to answer, were about Bruce checking up on him, tracking his location. _No worries, I just needed to make sure you were still alive_ was not exactly a thing he could say to Jason. Would say to Jason. 

His sleep was the teasing sleep of the insomniac, and he could feel the way his body avoided the calming depth of true sleep to flail him about in the shallows – a few minutes of sleep before the next waking, and the next, and the next. He rolled over again, and hugged the blanket tighter against the chill of the house. The blanket was soft, and spreading some warmth into him as he slipped back into not-quite-sleep. 

Except he didn’t remember getting a blanket. 

He twisted quickly around, and there was Hal sitting in a puddle of lamplight in the chair opposite him. He was trying to read something on his phone, and frowning. He glanced over at Bruce, who was staring at him. 

“Did you change the wifi password?”

Bruce frowned. “It’s programmed to rotate,” he croaked. “Shifts every twenty-four hours.”

“Who the fuck does that?”

Bruce swallowed, struggled to orient himself. “Security,” he managed.

“Well that’s a load of bullshit,” Jordan said, slipping his phone back in his flight jacket. “Hey listen, before I left, I forgot to ask you a question.”

Bruce blinked at him. “Just hypothetically,” Jordan continued. “And for the sake of argument. How bad could I fuck up? What are my parameters here?”

Bruce sat up, but kept the blanket around him. “What are you—”

“Like, say I borrow your Lotus and wrap it around a tree, would that do it? Or, again hypothetically, say I let someone get in my head who should never have been there, and I bail on us because I just can’t deal, and I fuck up in every possible direction? Would that do it?”

The clock in the corner of the room was loud. He had not noticed before that it was so loud. Hal was just sitting in the chair across from the sofa, waiting. His eyes on Bruce. “I fucked up,” Hal said. His voice was thin and tired. “Tell me how to fix this and I will, I swear to fucking God I will.”

He had no idea what to say to that. How to make Hal see. Hal thought, somehow, that he had to earn Bruce’s forgiveness. That there was some transaction here that needed to be accomplished, this for me and that for you. Some ridiculous idea of fairness. Would Hal Jordan ever stop wanting the world to be fair? Bruce could not make him see, not with words. 

“I can’t make it that easy,” Bruce said. “I can’t just forget that you walked.”

Hal’s eyes were on the floor now. “I—I know,” he said. 

“There would need to be. . . some conditions.”

Hal was nodding. “Okay,” he said faintly.

“I notice you’re wearing your flight jacket,” Bruce said. 

“I. . . yes? It was. . . pretty chilly, and I didn’t think I could fly all the way back without attracting notice, so I actually walked the last five or so miles, and it’s starting to rain a little bit out there, which was—”

“I’m just saying,” Bruce said. “I think you know what condition one is going to be.”

Hal was staring at him, frowning. “Are you. . .”

“Let’s get going,” Bruce said. “I don’t have all night.” He crossed his arms, and let the little smirk tug at his mouth. He let the smirk become a smile. He saw the moment when Hal caught the smirk, and he saw Hal’s slow answering smile, and he watched it spread to his eyes and light the gray hollows beneath them.

“Well you worthless motherfucker,” Hal drawled. 

“Tick tock,” Bruce said, glancing at his watch. 

Hal stood and threw off his jacket. He unbuckled his pants, toed off his shoes, slipped off his underwear, peeled off his shirt. He took a little more time with the shirt than was strictly necessary, and flexed a little bit as he twisted to toss his shirt on the chair behind him. Then he reached for the jacket and shrugged it on. He put his hands on his hips in a pose he was clearly aware showed him to excellent advantage. 

“Huh,” Bruce said, tilting his head to scrutinize. 

“Huh what? What does ‘huh’ mean?” 

“No no it’s fine, it is a little cold in here after all.”

“All right, that’s it, you’re going down,” Hal said, tearing off his jacket. “Arrogant smart-ass dickhole—” He launched himself on top of Bruce, wrestling him into an easy full-body pin against the sofa, but Bruce was not exactly resisting. Bruce wrapped his legs around the warm brown body stretched on top of him, and pulled the blanket around them both, because the room was actually a bit chilly, and he didn’t want Hal to be cold. 

They didn’t do anything but lie there with arms wrapped so tight Bruce could feel small spasms set in, after a while, but neither of them let go. “I’m so fucking sorry,” Hal said. It was soft and little more than an exhalation of sound against his neck. “I can’t believe I—baby, I’m so fucking, fucking—”

“No,” Bruce said. “No. We don’t need to do that, you don’t owe me anything, you never did, can we just—”

They were nonsense words, and he didn’t know what he was saying, but Hal seemed to understand him. Their words were whispers against each other’s skin, and the words themselves weren’t important, just the sound, the touch of breath, the touch of their fingers. And sometimes this too was what life was like: the unexpected reprieve, the grace you hadn’t earned, the last-minute commutation of sentence. Sometimes when you dialed the number in the middle of the night, there was a voice on the other end of it, the one you had never expected to hear again. 

The sofa was never going to work for them, of course. They made it back to Bruce’s room, because it was closest, and it was like it had been the first night: they were gentle with each other, and tentative, and it was hands and quiet kisses in the dark. There was no unsureness to this, though, and no desperation either. They were too tired for anything very athletic, so they kept their eyes on each other, their arms around each other, and Hal’s hands wrapped around both their cocks like on the first night, and they found a slow easy rhythm. 

“I forgot to tell you,” Hal whispered, “how much I missed your cock.”

“You were away from it for six hours.”

“Too fucking long.”

Bruce dug his fingers into the back of Hal’s head, ate his mouth, fucked into his fist. “Tell me when you feel like coming,” Hal said. 

“You close?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I gonna feel it?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Come on sweetheart, get me wet,” Bruce murmured, and he felt Hal convulse in his arms, oh God nothing had ever felt so good, his chest had never felt so shot through with hot light as holding Hal when he was coming, feeling every second of his pleasure, slick and warm up against his cock, gasp of breath against his neck. Bruce nudged Hal’s sticky fingers aside and replaced them with his own, easing Hal down. His thumb pressing on the underside wring another little spasm from Hal, and a low groan. Bruce lifted Hal’s sticky hand and licked at it. Hal came down slowly, slowly. He cracked a weary eye and watched Bruce.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on, don’t stop.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah baby, come on.”

Bruce slid on top of him and let himself just rut against that beautiful body, right at the join of his soft sac and softening cock, held tight by those firm warm arms. His orgasm was neither sharp nor sudden, but a long slow unraveling, and Hal held a finger of pressure at his hole that felt delicious. He rocked back onto the finger and let himself go, let Hal cradle him through it. 

He spiraled back into his body more slowly than he usually did. He quickly raised his head, though. He hadn’t meant to be quite this heavily on top of Hal. Had he held him down? He was tired and hadn’t been careful. “Sorry,” he said sliding off. “Are you—did I—”

“Shh, no, it’s fine,” Hal said, tugging him back. “Chill, babe.”

“Mm,” Bruce murmured, and let his head collapse back on that beautiful chest. 

“Oh Jesus,” Hal groaned. “That is never not gonna feel like cuddling an anvil.”

“Seven,” Bruce said, muffled into Hal’s chest.

“Seven what?”

“Seven seconds, more or less. I’ve been loosely tracking the length of time between endearment and insult. I notice it keeps shortening. That was about seven seconds between ‘babe’ and ‘anvil.’”

“Motherfucker,” Hal said. “That doesn’t even count. Babe isn’t really an endearment, it’s more of a verbal quirk. I call everyone babe.”

“Oh. All right then. So your argument is, instead of being 50 percent endearment and 50 percent insult, the ratio is actually closer to 100 percent insult?”

“Yeah, roughly. I mean, give or take. I think we should work to keep it right at 100 percent insult, 100 percent hot dirty fucking.”

“And you accuse me of being the romantic here.” The chest beneath his head rumbled in a soft laugh, and Hal’s hand stroked his head. 

“Hey, just thought of something.” Bruce was mainly asleep, but managed an answering grunt. “Hey, wake up,” Hal said, tugging at a bit of hair.

“What.”

“I just realized, I get mine next.”

“Yours?”

“Yeah. You got the jacket, which is fair, but now I get the glasses.”

Bruce shifted his head. “You want me naked, wearing only my glasses,” he said.

“Oh no no no. That isn’t. . . exactly the picture I have in my head. My vision is a little more action-oriented than that.”

“Action-oriented.”

“Yep. See, what I’m seeing is, you, balls to the breeze, nothing on but those sexyfine glasses, on your knees, you choking on my cock in your mouth. That’s the money shot I’m looking for. And my turn is up next, so get some rest.”

“That’s. . . not going to be at all comfortable.”

“Too bad so sad. I get mine.”

Bruce sighed heavily, and he did his best to make it sound aggrieved, but he suspected Hal knew better. His whole body felt light and flooded with warmth, like his skin was possibly floating a millimeter or two above him, and his mouth kept twitching upward when he least expected it. Nothing was solved, of course. There was every reason to believe that they would just be hitting lather, rinse, repeat on every single obstacle and argument, and there was even more reason to believe that this was indeed, as Hal had said, the apocalypse. And as Hal had pointed out, they had yet to even make it down the driveway without killing each other. 

But it was possible. Anything was possible. His best friend was an alien, his lover wore a magic power ring, and when he picked up the phone, Jason was on the other end. Who was to say they couldn’t find a way to love each other?

He burrowed closer into Hal’s chest, and wondered who the hell made a fetish out of corneal astigmatism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a small Jay/Dick out-take for this chapter, describing what happened at the other end of the line when Bruce called Jason: [That Three AM Phone Call](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6943387). Don't forget to click back here for the [epilogue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6809425/chapters/15835141), though. :)


	11. Epilogue

The lunch was not difficult to set up. A matter of his secretary calling her secretary, and while the level of negotiation was probably intense at that level – status would dictate that the first time slot offered by his secretary be refused by hers, and that the counter-offer be countered in turn – all he really needed to know was that a time had been settled on for the following Tuesday. The place, of course, was never an item of negotiation; it would be Chez Edouard, because of the sightlines. He would have his usual table prepared. 

Nevertheless, it was best to be sure of these things, so he arrived twenty minutes early. Unsurprisingly, he waited for forty minutes for his lunch date, who arrived a fashionable if irritating twenty minutes late. “Bruce Wayne,” she said, her voice a husky trill, her hand extended even before he had risen to shake it. For a half second it seemed like she might keep her palm flat like in the expectation he might kiss it, but she turned it at the last minute with a throaty laugh. 

“Cat Grant,” he said. “A pleasure. It seems like we should have had lunch a long time ago.”

“Does it?”

“The two largest media conglomerates on the East Coast. I’m sure there’s business we ought to be doing.”

She tipped her sunglasses down and ran her eyes over him. “Yes, I’m sure there is,” she said appreciatively, and she handed her bag to a waiter. “I called ahead to make sure the coconut water was chilled to forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. One-quarter teaspoon sesame oil. Don’t disappoint me.”

“No ma’am,” he said, and scuttled out of sight. She raked the glasses off and tossed them on the table, and Bruce watched her fold her slim elegant body into the chair with what looked like easy abandon but was of course its opposite. 

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said, a small smile tugging at her mouth. Her lips were really quite extraordinary. It would be easy to fall into the effortless flirtation called for here, but he was on more serious business today, and he pondered how to proceed. The past two weeks of thinking about this had not yielded any answers, nor had the time he spent contemplating it in the shower this morning, or on the drive over here. She cocked her head at his quiet thoughtfulness. She was stunningly gorgeous, but more than that, there was a certain razor-sharp edge to her that he found intriguing. 

“Ms. Grant,” he began.

“Cat, surely.”

“Cat. You and I have. . . a mutual friend.”

“Darling, I’m sure we have a hundred.”

“You’re not wrong. But this particular friend we have in common is. . . unusual.”

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t keep the phone numbers of usual people. Do you?”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “Our mutual friend trusts you a great deal,” he said, “and so I am inclined to as well.”

“My my how very cloak and dagger,” she said, the smile becoming wicked. “If this is industrial espionage we’re plotting, I’m listening. But I feel I should warn you, before we get ahead of ourselves, darling: I no longer date American, and I’m just not in the market right now. Not that you’re not very tempting, and of course I’m flattered by all this. You understand, I’m sure.”

“Our mutual friend is a pilot named Hal Jordan.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. I don’t know any Hank Jordan.”

He studied her. He took the napkin from under his water glass, and a pen from his jacket. Idly he doodled on the napkin. When he was done he turned the doodle to her, wordlessly. He saw her arch her brow at the Lantern symbol he had drawn. “Interesting,” she said. “So you’re a fan. I must admit to having a soft spot for that particular one, if only because there’s no cape to hide that magnificent southern view, if you know what I mean.”

“Not wrong about that either,” he said. “I appreciate your discretion, believe me. Hal’s trust is evidently not misplaced.”

“Darling, I’m happy to be discreet all you want, but like I said, I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You and I have spoken before,” Bruce said. 

“We have? Oh dear. I’m beginning to see where this is going. This is about Minorca, isn’t it? July of last year? It was a very bad time for me, there are whole weeks that are just gone from my memory. It was the Manzana Verde, how was I to know it was 80 proof alcohol? The name means green apple, I just assumed it was an exotic local cider.”

“On the phone,” Bruce said. “A few weeks ago.”

“Oh?” She was frowning slightly.

“Yes. You called Hal in the middle of the day, and in the middle of your conversation I snatched the phone from him.”

“You. . .” She stopped. She had gone quite still, and was just watching him. He waited. He watched her replaying the phone conversation in her head. _This is Batman. Yes, how are you. Hal is with me. A little busy right now._ She had not blinked in some time. Cat Grant’s public persona was clearly about as much a measure who she was as a person, as Bruce Wayne’s public persona was of him. They were two canny people, watching each other. 

The waiter appeared with menus and fresh water and bread. They sat in silence, watching only each other. When the waiter had gone, she leaned forward. “Why. . .” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Why are you. . . I don’t understand. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because of our mutual friend. Because I know that you are invaluable to him. And because he trusts you.”

She was looking at him, but not exactly at him – all over him. He watched her scan his brow, his hairline, his jaw, squaring it in her head with what she knew, had seen of Batman. 

“Do you believe that I am telling you the truth?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, still studying him. And then her eyes had focused back on his. “But I don’t really understand why.”

“Hal’s well-being is important to me. It’s an interest we share.”

“So I understand,” she said, with a delicate arch of brow. “You should know that I am excellent at keeping secrets. And. . . you can trust me with yours.”

“I know that.” 

“But knowing this and never telling anyone is probably going to give me congestive heart failure.”

He smiled. “Something tells me you’re tougher than that. How is Kara these days?”

“Ahh, now I see. This is about checking up on her?”

“I promise you, no.”

“Because she does not need any oversight from anyone, you can rest assured about that. We in National City are well-protected, and we don’t need any bats swooping around on our buildings and making things explode.”

“Believe me, I—”

“We have a very different way of doing business from the way things are run in Gotham. Much more orderly. If you expect me not to tell Kara you were snooping around, nothing doing.”

“Cat, I assure you, I have no intention of snooping or swooping, for that matter. And you’re welcome to mention me to Kara. You might tell her, Grumpy Ass says hello.”

Her mouth twitched. “Grumpy Ass?”

He shrugged. “She and I have some differences of opinion, every now and then. It’s possible I am not her favorite person.”

Cat threw her head back and laughed, and he smiled too. “Now _that_ head to head, I would pay money to see,” she said.

* * *

The rest of their lunch was actually quite pleasant. He had enjoyed talking to her about Kara, and once he had pressed her for some information about her sons she had not stopped talking, and had even shown him some pictures. In return he had shown her pictures of Damian, and told some carefully edited stories, and then at some point he had seen her realize they were talking about _Robin_ , about _the_ Robin, and she had pulled his phone closer and studied the picture some more. 

_I think you have a life where everyone you love is in danger all the time,_ she had said, her keen somber eyes on him. 

_Yes,_ he had said. _But it has its rewards._

He went back to the office afterward and finished up his work for the week – he was leaving word that he would be in Vienna, but in fact he needed to do some undercover work in Metropolis, which Clark would not be thrilled about, but Clark did not need to know all of Batman’s activity. “Final stack of the day, Mr. Wayne,” his secretary said, coming in with what appeared to be a mountain of hard copy for him to look through. “The price of Gstaad,” she said with a smile, sorting the stacks on his desk, and he grimaced.

His phone buzzed with the call he knew would come. “Yes,” he said, watching Janine prioritize his files. 

“Hello there,” Hal said. “Hi. Hey. So glad to catch you. Are you doing well? That’s good. Quick question: are you fucking brain damaged?”

“I’m going to need the room,” he said softly to Janine.

“So I just got off the phone with Cat,” Hal was saying.

“Ah.”

“Yeah, _ah_. Don’t fucking act like this is surprising information, like you somehow didn’t think I would find out about this. Bruce, what the ever-living fucking hell. What in the _fuck_.”

“I get that you’re angry right now.”

“That would be where you’re wrong. I am not fucking angry.”

“Really. Well, that would be some surprising information, since you’ve been swearing at me non-stop since I picked up the phone.”

“You are being a smart ass with me,” Hal said. “Un-fucking-believable. You actually are. Do you know why I’m not angry with you?”

“No.” Bruce spun in his chair to look out on the wide vista of Gotham, its gray skies and sluggish river. Hal’s voice was disturbingly calm.

“I’m not angry, Bruce, because I am way, way beyond angry.”

“I see.”

“No, I really don’t think that’s the case. I really do not, _not_ think that is the case at all. Because what I am, Bruce, is fucking furious,” he said, and his voice was as calm and amiable as before. 

“Ah,” Bruce said again. “Well, if you’ll listen for a—”

“No,” Hal said. “No, I will not be listening. You are the one who is going to do some listening.”

Janine stuck her head back in the door. If he had had a baseball to hand, he would have pitched it at the doorframe, but his face apparently did the job. She quickly shut the door again. “You had no right to do that,” Hal said. “You invaded the most private part of my life, you waltzed into a space I did not invite you to be in. Do you understand that? Is there any part of you that can grasp that?”

“Yes.”

“Not to mention, you fucking _outed_ yourself? To Cat fucking Grant, owner of CatCo Worldwide Media, no less? You walked right up and said, hi, how are you doing, would you like to have lunch, oh and by the way, _I’m Batman_.”

“That is not an accurate representation of what happened. For one thing, we were sitting down.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. The possibility he might have miscalculated was beginning to dawn on him. “This is a fucking joke to you,” Hal said. 

“Hal,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“You didn’t have a _choice_? What, Cat was blackmailing you? She was about to run an exposé on your latest super-secret naked getaway to St. Tropez?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s fall, no one’s in St. Tropez.”

“I may actually and sincerely murder you. You do realize my capacity to murder someone and get away with is pretty much infinite, right? Your body would be space dust in some asteroid field three galaxies over before anyone even thought to look for you.”

“Hal. If you will just—”

“I will not fucking _just_ anything, you arrogant prick. You sat down with Cat fucking Grant and revealed your identity. You sat down with the owner of the largest media conglomerate on the East Coast and said, I’m sure this won’t be a problem, but I’m going to hand you the answer to the biggest media mystery of the twenty-first century? I’m just going to _hand you_ the identity of Batman, because I was repeatedly dropped on my head as an infant?”

“Second,” Bruce said.

“What?”

“The second largest media conglomerate. You’re sleeping with the owner of the largest media conglomerate.”

“No, he’s sleeping on the fucking sofa.”

“Hal. Do you honestly think Cat Grant is any kind of security risk to my identity, or that she would seriously contemplate revealing my identity? The woman who knows the identity of the Green Lantern, and Supergirl, and, let us be honest, probably Superman as well? This is clearly a woman who can keep her own counsel, and that of several other people as well.”

He heard Hal’s sigh. “No, of course I don’t think she would. But _I_ know that because I trust her. _You_ had no way of knowing that. And furthermore, here’s some wisdom from a former addict, you don’t put that kind of temptation in front of someone. I’m clean, but I don’t think you’ll be taking me to an all-you-can-eat heroin buffet anytime soon, yeah?”

“If you tell me they have those in Kentucky, I would believe it.”

“I cannot believe these words are about to come out of my mouth, but could you stop being a fucking smart-ass for five seconds?”

“Hal. You told me yourself. It’s the only way this works.”

“ _I_ told you? Are you—are you fucking kidding me, you think _I_ told you to do this? What the hell are you even—”

“You said, this is the only way recovery works.”

There was silence on the other end. Bruce waited to hear something, but he couldn’t even hear Hal breathing. “You said it yourself. This is the only way recovery works. You can’t keep things from Cat. You can’t lie to your sponsor. For better or worse, we are in each other’s lives. You have to be able to talk to someone who knows the whole truth about your life. Every time you pick up the phone to talk to her, you can’t be worrying about whether you’re going to slip up, about whether you’re going to use my actual name. You have to be able to tell the truth.”

There was still only silence. Bruce licked his lips, waited a bit. Still nothing. “Yes, it was invasive,” he continued. “I know that.”

“You risked your life,” Hal said. His voice was if anything even quieter. “Your identity protects your life, and your family’s life. You risked all of that. You risked your fucking life today.”

He could prevaricate, he could minimize. Hal would not welcome that. “Yes,” he finally said. 

“So that. . . what, so my life would be a little bit easier?”

He hesitated. Hard to know if there was a right answer here. “Yes,” he said again. 

“Why?”

It was his turn to be silent. If Hal didn’t already have the answer to that one, he wasn’t sure he could give it. He could say, _you would have done the same for me_ , and both of them would know it was true. But that wouldn’t answer Hal’s question, which was not even a real question. It was more of a dare. “You know why,” he said. 

Hal’s silence answered his silence. They were going to sit on the phone and out-silence each other. A death match of sullen stubbornness. “Yeah, okay,” Hal sighed at last.

“But you’re still angry.”

“Yep.”

“Even though you know I’m right.”

“I am angry, Bruce, because this is the sort of thing we talk about, before you make a unilateral decision that involves my personal life.”

“Would you have recommended this course of action, then, if we had talked?”

“No, I would not have recommended that you risk your life by revealing your identity to _anyone_ , Jesus Christ.”

“Then I had no choice.”

He heard the gust of Hal’s sigh on the other end. “I could have—I could have made it work,” Hal said. “I was protecting your identity. Yes, she knows we’re together, she knows all that, but I was using a code name, I wasn’t in any danger of—I mean, that you just—Jesus fuck, Bruce.”

“You know it’s better this way.”

“I know that you think you know better and you will always one hundred percent of the time do what you think is best without consulting anyone. That is what I know.”

Bruce studied the skyline, and the impending rain on the horizon. “I could apologize,” he said.

“Which you and I both know would be a lie. Listen, are we still doing something with Clark and Diana tonight? Because Carol just asked me to log one more flight, and I can say yes, but it might make me later than we had said.”

Bruce was quiet for a minute, because he knew what forgiveness sounded like. Hal might not say _I understand why you did what you did, even if I am still angry about it,_ any more than he would say _do you understand what I would do for you, do you understand I would carve out my heart with a rusted knife and slice open every vein in my body if it would buy you one minute’s ease, and do it without question, do you understand this, tell me you understand this._ But instead he said, “No, I think that will be fine. I’ll let them know.”

“Cool. I gotta get back on deck.”

“All right. And, about that sofa thing—”

“Oh I meant that, this will not be a night of you getting lucky. You and your right hand better get re-acquainted for a while.”

“Mm. Well, since this is a situation that depends on your resolve, I don’t think I’m in danger of too long a re-acquaintance.”

“Jesus Christ, every time I think you might be learning when to keep your mouth shut. You just cannot leave well enough alone, can you? If you’d gone to public school you would have been the kid mouthing off under his breath _after_ he’s already gotten seventeen detentions for mouthing off in the first place. Why do you dare people to make it worse, every time? Have you zero degree of chill?”

Bruce knew better than to let his smile show through in his voice. “Go get on flight deck,” he said. “Text me when you’re done.”

“Yeah yeah. Such a fucking asshole.” 

Bruce clicked off, and since there was no one around and no sign that Janine would be returning any time soon, there was no need to hide his smile. It warmed him from the inside, the rest of the afternoon.


End file.
